36 Hours (1964)

In honor of Veterans Day, I recommend a solid yet under-seen World War II thriller with a big-name cast, written and directed by A-list member George Seaton (Miracle on 34th Street, The Country Girl).  If you’ve already seen 36 Hours, I suspect you remember it (fondly) because, mingling a mind-game cleverness with slam-bang suspense, it’s kind of irresistible.  Hardly an authentic portrait of the war, it belongs to a sub-genre of WWII movie that might be described as the live-action comic book.  This juicily page-turning approach makes the black-and-white 36 Hours enjoyably reminiscent of dozens of WWII movies made during the war, when the subject was often surprisingly tailored to become surefire escapist entertainment.  Intentionally shielding wartime audiences from the actual horrors, these morale-boosting movies luxuriated in melodramatic intrigues often set on soundstage European capitals populated by particularly glamorous and attractive spies.  Whether set in the U.S. or abroad, in battle or on the domestic front, among the films that treated the war as a comic-book escapade are Saboteur (1942), Desperate Journey (1942), Background to Danger (1943), Above Suspicion (1943), First Comes Courage (1943), and Five Graves to Cairo (1943).  In its gleefully outlandish plotting, its climactic pulse-quickening chase, and its somewhat dimwitted Nazi official, 36 Hours is a pleasing throwback even though it’s far less glamorized than your average war movie of 1942-45.  In 1964, the need to boost morale had long ago faded, and the war’s outcome was part of our history, but, even so, WWII continued to be Hollywood’s war of choice.

Based on a Roald Dahl story, 36 Hours is a WWII picture focused on D-Day.  Starring James Garner, it is in fact Garner’s other D-Day movie of 1964, following the even-better comedy-drama The Americanization of Emily with Julie Andrews.  Like Emily, 36 Hours begins in London (on May 31, 1944, to be exact), with Garner, a U.S. major, off to Lisbon to see if he can find out if the Germans have uncovered the Allies’ plan for the invasion.  After his coffee is drugged, Garner is captured and brought to Germany.  The Nazis’ brilliant, outrageous plot is to wake Garner and convince him that D-Day has already happened and was a great success, hoping this will lead to his casually revealing the supposedly long-ago details of the invasion.  He’s told that the Allies won the war!  And so it becomes a game of whether or not the Germans can extract the information before Garner figures out what’s happened.  With a population of “extras,” the setting is a fake U.S. military hospital, an elaborate construct designed to persuade Garner that he’s convalescing in the Occupied Germany of 1950.  His hair has been grayed a bit, and his vision somewhat blurred, all in the name of six supposed years of aging.  You may be reminded of The Truman Show (1998) as you watch so many people work tirelessly hard to convince one person that an unreal world is completely genuine.

Rod Taylor co-stars as the German doctor in charge of the charade.  He has been given 36 hours to get the necessary information from Garner.  If the doctor fails, the S.S. will take over, presumably with torture.  American-born but a German citizen since age 16, Taylor is a sympathetic “bad guy.”  He intended for his scientific research and carefully honed methods to be of vital use to amnesia and battle-fatigue victims, which is why he’s the film’s good-guy-on-the-wrong-side.  The Germans have used his methods 18 times, achieving minor espionage successes but nothing yet on the scale of the Garner scheme.  Eva Marie Saint plays the concentration camp survivor “cast” in the role of Garner’s nurse.  To reveal more wouldn’t be fair; let’s just say that the plotting continues to be intricate, farfetched, and altogether riveting.  Essentially, the movie sets up an intellectual battle between two extremely smart and evenly matched men.  The reason the film works as well as it does is because Garner and Taylor themselves are unusually intelligent and charismatic actors.  Their subtleties, including their natural tendencies to underplay, actually make the gosh-darn-thing almost plausible.

36 Hours is a thriller of both mind and body, a brain-twister and a physical workout.  Writer-director Seaton manages to combine an atmospheric realism and a fantastic plot into a cohesive movie.  But it’s not helped by a cartoonish Nazi villain (Werner Peters), almost a Hogan’s Heroes kind of bad guy.  And there’s some forced bits in the writing, such as when Ms. Saint tells Garner that she is no longer capable of tears, which signals to us that she’ll be crying at the end of the movie.  Minor carping aside, 36 Hours is a humdinger.  How nice to report that, nearly fifty years after its release, all three of its stars are still with us.  I hope each of them mentions 36 Hours when asked, “Which of your films do you wish more people knew about?”