36 Hours (1964).......still remains one of our favorite films of the 1960's.
And that's even though it's far removed from the new and exciting groundbreaking cinema that was erupting all through that tumultuous decade.
On the contrary, the film is traditional Hollywood product, solidly crafted by veteran writer director George Seaton, who specialized in big boxoffice crowd pleasers....(in a career that stretched from "Miracle On 34th St." to "Airport" and "The Counterfeit Traitor")
This film fell into a unique genre all its own.....a suspense-espionage World War 2 thriller.
And the plot hook here was a doozy.....on the eve of D-Day, an American Major (James Garner) one of the planners of the Normandy invasion, is drugged, kidnapped and taken to a Nazi military hospital not far from the Swiss border.
.......but it's a Nazi facility cleverly decked out to precisely mimic, in every little detail, an American hospital.
The German doctor (Rod Taylor) who's masterminded this elaborate ruse intends to trick the Major into thinking he sat out the war years in a coma. And since he's awakened into a world where the Allies triumphed, the doc hopes to take the befuddled, disoriented officer down memory lane..... and spill the D-Day landing sites.
Director Seaton smoothly pulls off this far fetched premise, making it seem more realistic and urgent by the use of that odd combo of wide screen and black and white and further aided by the nervous piano work in Dimitri Tiomkin's score.
The top of the line cast gives it their full commitment, including Eva Marie Saint as an emotionally broken concentration camp inmate forced to play the part of 'nurse' in Taylor's fake hospital. Taylor himself navigates a tricky role here, since the script ultimately casts him as an almost sympathetic figure, threatened and bedeviled by the odious Gestapo slug (Werner Peters) who doubts Taylor's elaborate prank will succeed.
(Peters has one great bit of business here.....as he visibly grimaces while Taylor describes to Garner a rosy and uncomfortably truthful version of the war's end, with Gestapo goons hunted down and rounded up.....)
And let's tip our hat to character actor John Banner (renowned for his bellowing 'Sgt. Schultz 'in the problematic sitcom "Hogan's Heroes") who shows up in the film's climactic scenes as an anti-Nazi villager.
There's nothing spectacular or showy in '36 Hours', but it stands tall as a slick, perfectly realized chunk of old fashioned Hollywood entertainment. And that's why we still like it a lot. 4 stars (****)..
No comments:
Post a Comment