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Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Perfectly adorable

An Exercise In Nonsense

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

I enjoyed this, especially the beginning when they were setting up James Garner. His discovery of his plight was an interesting twist. One has to ask how hard it would be to pull something like this off with so many cultural tendencies on the part of the playactors. Eva Marie Saint does a kind of Garbo here and is pretty effective. She does go over pretty fast. While I enjoyed this, I have to say that the success of the characters depends on some really monumental stupidity on the parts of the Germans. John Banner is at his best as a predecessor to Sgt. Schultz from Hogan's Heroes. The drawback is the ease with which things play out.

a war film. not an ordinary one. because, more than a story, it is a form of embroidery. it is something who makes it different and that fact is the key for discover a movie who has the cast, the music and the script as impressive pillars not only for artistic value but for force of message. a film about sacrifices, touching and precise, out of ordinaries temptations of genre and seductive for a kind of beauty who has as source the art to choose the right actors. adventure, love, tension and honor , vulnerability and force are ingredients of it and that could not be a surprise. but the doses and the art of use is wise and that detail transforms one of so many war movies in a certainly must see it.

A film called Resisting Enemy Interrogation was released in 1944. Ostensibly, it was produced to dramatically demonstrate that any information (other than name, rank and serial number) provided by captured American soldiers could potentially cost American lives.In the film 36 Hours (1965), Major Pike (James Garner)is a captured American serviceman. He is the object of a clever German ruse devised by Major Gerber(Rod Taylor)to get him to reveal inside information about the Allied plans for the D-Day invasion. The action is set in 1944, so we can assume that Major Pike has been briefed on German interrogation techniques and warned of the various ploys that might be used to soften him up. In fact, this is asserted in the film.Eva Marie Saint plays the part of Anna, Gerber's collaborator. Playing on Pike's vulnerability, she helps convince Pike that the date and the location of his convalescence are not what he might have expected. I do not want to reveal much more about the plot, because the main enjoyments of this story come from the premise of the film and the various plot twists. Suffice it to say that this story of intrigue is worthy of Hitchcock.The title refers to the length of time the SS gives Major Gerber to prove the value of his unorthodox interrogation method. The time limit helps drive the action--fine use of a Hitchcock method, but without frequent images of a clock counting down. Speaking of Hitchcock, Eva Marie Saint played in North by North West (1959) and gives a performance as convincing in 36 Hours.I recommend this film for it plot that captures the imagination, the excellent performances by all actors, and a quality score.Watch for John Banner's portrayal of a German sergeant. In 1965 he will also begin his role as Sergeant Schultz in TV's Hogan's Heroes.

The television series "Mission: Impossible" started out being a variation on two different caper films, "Topkapi" and "Rififi," involving heists against seemingly "impossible" targets. But it quickly evolved into a "con of the week" show thanks to the two writers, William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter, who wrote the majority of the scripts during its first three seasons.What does this have to do with "36 Hours"? Well, a year before "Mission" even premiered, "36 Hours" presented a story remarkably similar to what the producers of "Mission" did week after week: if someone was placed in an isolated situation and given only enough information to make the setting appear real -- here, to convince American Major Jefferson Pike, played by James Garner, that the war has been over for years -- then that person might genuinely believe the "false front," and might also come to believe that revealing military secrets (such as the date and location of the D-Day invasion) is harmless. Indeed, this movie closely resembles -- or is resembled by -- an early episode of "Mission" known as "Operation Rogosh," the first to use this same confidence trick known as the "time shift," to make the subject think, like Maj. Pike here, that with the (false) passage of time, once precious secrets are no longer important.Of course, unlike the folks on the television series, the people who are operating the "big store" that was created for Maj. Pike are the bad guys, and therefore the audience desperately wants him to see through the deception. It all sounds implausible, yet by coloring his hair as if had gone slightly gray, fuzzing his vision enough so that he seems to need reading glasses, and completing the background with just enough personal articles stolen from his London flat, the illusion is strong enough to make him believe the story, at least at the outset.A surprise is Australian Rod Taylor as an American-born German psychiatrist who is the primary confidante for Garner's character, as well as Eva Marie Saint as a nurse who is a different kind of confidante -- with a strong incentive to make the deception work. And for a time it does . . . so convincingly, in fact, that it seems perfectly natural for Garner's character to give them exactly what they want. Of course, with the then-major star that Taylor was in the role, it's foregone that he won't be as unsympathetic as some of the other Nazi characters.The movie is also spiced with a thoroughly-believable Celia Lovsky as a sympathetic local villager -- and John Banner, best known for playing Sgt. Schultz on "Hogan's Heroes" as a real hero here! Unfortunately, this movie is not as well-known as those that came along later, such as "Mission" and "The Sting," but perhaps now that it's out on DVD, that will change. A winning film from beginning to end.