#287: 36 Hours
A forgotten thriller classic
This review was originally posted to Twitter on July 2, 2020.
Initial release: November 26, 1964
Director: George Seaton
I love 1960s black and white films. There’s a garishness that permeates most color films up until the 1970s that simply isn’t there when the film is in black and white. And as George Seaton’s amazing World War 2 thriller 36 Hours proves, a good psychological thriller doesn’t always need color.
James Garner (who was also in The Great Escape) is US Army major Jeff Pike. Pike has a secret: he knows every detail of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Europe, which is just days away. The question is, what do the Nazis know, and how much do they know it? Sent to Lisbon in neutral Portugal to meet with an informant who will confirm whether or not the Nazis believe the landings will be at Pas de Calais rather than Normandy, he is drugged, kidnapped, and shipped off to Germany. The Nazi plan: convince him it’s 1950, the war is over, and get him to spill.
He wakes up with his hair dyed grey, his vision blurred without glasses, newspapers are dated 1950, the Army hospital seems authentic — surely, he’s in occupied Germany! And for a time, he believes it… hell, it’s so convincing even the audience might believe it. As sixties thrillers go, this is one of the better ones. The premise is James Bond levels of absurd, but then again, it’s hardly farfetched when you consider that the Allies constructed an entire fake army unit complete with inflatable tanks to fool the enemy.
Opposite Garner is Eva Marie Saint as Anna, a Jewish nurse plucked out of a concentration camp for her English and nursing skills, and her willingness to do anything to stay out of the camps. She’s gentle and careful, but clearly broken from her time in the camps. Of course eventually pike finds out about the deception, and Anna convinces him to let her help him escape. What really sells this movie for me is that where a genuine romantic element might grow from this relationship, it never does — but the two become friends, nonetheless.
In charge of this whole operation is Rod Taylor as German major Walter Gerber, a German-American who migrated to Germany as a teenager and now works as an army doctor. The whole setup was his idea, built out of a treatment for PTSD for soldiers on the eastern front. He’s a surprisingly warm, intelligent man, for whom this isn’t personal, and indeed he resents having to use his treatment method in this manner. In fact, he’s not the villain here — that distinction goes to Otto Shack, an SS thug (Werner Peters) who’s skeptical of the plan.
Of course, nearly 80 years after the war, we know how the Normandy landings went. So you might argue that there’s no suspense. But that’s the magic of movies, isn’t it? Like I said before, the whole setup is so convincing you’d almost believe it yourself. This is the kind of spy movie I like, the really psychological stuff. Any idiot in a tuxedo can do a snowmobile chase down the side of a mountain. But escaping from a deluxe-sized gaslighting operation that was trying to get you to spill top-secret information? Now that’s the good shit.
Seaton’s cinematography is a bit workmanlike at times, but it’s otherwise competent and accompanied by an excellent score on the part of composer Dimitri Tiomkin — an early scene where the music stops just as Pike succumbs to the drug is fantastic.
While color films were not uncommon by 1965, Seaton’s decision to film in black and white does a lot for the film’s mood and style. It hearkens back to the 30s and 40s, when psychological thrillers were becoming more common, and the image quality has definitely aged very well. There’s a lot of WW2 movies out there, but this is an unsung classic that seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle of big, explodey 1960s classics like The Longest Day and The Guns of Navarone. It’s a shame: it deserves better.
