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Best movie of this year hands down!

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Berlin Express (1948)Just after WWII has ended comes this film about getting inside the post-Nazi world for an assassination. It's multi-national and filled with bitter scenes of German ruin.This actually is an amazing film, starting off (and ending) as beautiful and dramatic. And it's complex but luckily edited with precision. It's filmed with remarkable realism in post-war German (Frankfurt and Berlin), with trains and train stations and lots of darkness and steam and drama. (Later there are huge areas of utter utter devastation.) The first half hour has a stunning film-noir style, lots of angles, deep shadows, moving camera, and so on, all under the hand of master cinematographer Lucien Ballard. It's great to just watch.It's also a rare imperfect glimpse of what it might actually be like in that era where Germany was an occupied territory. It's almost shocking, even now, or maybe especially now since we have seldom seen anything remotely this vast and awful in a long time. That really is the depth of the movie that was intended and effective.The plot (trying to save a German diplomat who is out for a peaceful future) you might call a device, and it is the weakness of it all, even though they place much of the best of it on a train where the drama is classic train stuff, car to car. There is also a lot of narration, explaining (rather well, but still having to explain) what is going on. Robert Ryan plays the leading man, an American agriculture expert out to help recovery in Europe. There is also the expected stereotyping—the casual smart American, the principled and arrogant Soviet, the suspicious and duplicitous Germans, the interested but somewhat victimized French, and the humorous and unflappable Brit. I'm serious—it's here, and it's done well enough you can easily buy into it. Merle Oberon is restrained but wonderful.Director Jacques Tourneau is always interesting and often compromised ("Out of the Past" is interesting and very uncompromised, for sure.) This movie has so many shifts and complications it is hard to know what they all mean, and this makes it all the more interesting, even as the narration deadens our absorption into events. I admit to liking every minute of it, even the bureaucratic office scenes (which had their own slight believability). By the end, as they all say goodbye and drive in separate directions, the truth of divided Germany was clear—even in 1948.The very last scene shows a man with one leg and crutches moving through some partly destroyed columns—very symbolic and right on.

This film has shades of Hitchcock, there is even a mind reader act reminiscent to The 39 Steps and Mr Memory.This is an effective thriller with a semi documentary overtones and location shooting in a bombed out Frankfurt and Berlin after the war. Director Jacques Tourneur makes effective use of the locations but this is a somewhat muddled thriller.A train from Paris to Berlin has Robert Ryan playing an American agricultural expert, Robert Coote, a British teacher, Roman Toporow a Russian soldier and Charles Korvin, a French official.Merle Oberon is another French national who is accompanying German Paul Lukas who was a leader of the anti Hitler German underground and who has plans to present at a conference for German unification in the post war period.Lukas is also a marked man, an assassination attempt has gone wrong and he is later kidnapped. The others get together to find him.The film made in 1948 foreshadows the Cold War with distrust between the Russians and the Americans. The film gives thought that a divided Germany might not had been the best solution.

A young Robert Ryan is one of a multi-national collection of characters on a train bound for Berlin where they are due to hear an address by a Konrad Adanauer style politician who is endeavouring to oversee the peaceful unification of a defeated Germany in the wake of WWII. On board the train, this disparate group of strangers, which includes the politician's secretary, a British diplomat, a Frenchman and a Russian soldier, witness what they believe to be the assassination of the politician, although they later discover that he was actually a double used to divert attention away from the real peacemaker. However, the real politician is then kidnapped by a group of Nazis intent on resurrecting the Third Reich.Berlin Express is a solid enough thriller which clearly had loftier aspirations than most mainstream thrillers, and is considerably enhanced by some location footage of war-blasted Frankfurt that adds real atmosphere to the tale. The film attempts to underline the differences between the various nationalities while simultaneously trying to emphasise the importance of the nations they represent working together to find an acceptable solution to what was clearly a delicate situation at the time. This was before the Russians zoned off their tranche of the country to claim it for Communism, and it's clear that there's a little uncertainty about how to treat their representative – a somewhat stereotypically humourless young soldier – at a time when Russia was just beginning to be perceived as the next potential threat by US politicians. 'Perhaps you should try to understand us,' Ryan's character gently admonishes the young Russian at the end of the film – words that ring particularly hollowly in the light of the hysteria which would soon grip Hollywood.Politics aside, the film provides decent entertainment. Merle Oberon fails to disguise her heady exoticism in her role as a German, but we'll forgive her that simply because she has such beguiling cheek bones. Ryan is handsome and tall – and effortlessly superior to all those around him as his unlikely comrades pretty much stand back and allow him to sort things out. There's one effective sequence in which a fatally wounded spy dressed as a clown (long story) scrambles across the dusty rubble of Frankfurt's ruins, hotly pursued by a couple of Nazi thugs. He eludes them, only to fall, dying, at our hero's feet, just enough breath left in him to whisper a key piece of information. Good stuff.

First-rate noir, one of many to unfold within the ominous mood of war-torn Europe (with the standard of such fare being set by next year's THE THIRD MAN). It is also one of several emanating from this era to follow a documentary-style pattern – which, however, renders it heavy-going in this case and is ultimately what dates it most of all. The title ranks it besides among a number of espionage thrillers set aboard a train; again, the template for these is THE LADY VANISHES (1938), with which this even shares one of its actors (Paul Lukas, still traveling incognito but now being the abducted party rather than the one doing the kidnapping!).Having mentioned Hitchcock's film, this is yet another effort by director Tourneur in that tradition (incidentally, he followed it with the recently-viewed CIRCLE OF DANGER [1951] and NIGHT OF THE DEMON [1957], co-scripted by Hitchcock regular Charles Bennett). In fact, the plot basically resolves itself in a handful of striking suspense sequences: an explosion in a train compartment; a kidnapping at a busy train station; a 39 STEPS-like 'memory test' in a club; a showdown in an abandoned brewery; and a near-strangling during yet another train journey ingeniously reflected in the glass of a parallel sleeping-car.The rest of the cosmopolitan cast includes American Robert Ryan (by now growing nicely as a leading man), 'French' Merle Oberon (amusingly, she confounds her fellow passengers by alternating between languages when they initially try 'hitting' on her; even if lovingly photographed by cinematographer husband Lucien Ballard, she is perhaps over-age to fill the romantic interest spot and is saddled throughout with a silly feathered hat!), Frenchman Charles Korvin (effectively emerging as the real villain of the piece), Briton Robert Coote (usually there to provide comic relief, he plays it reasonably straight in this case) and, in what constitutes a bit part (as a murder victim), German Fritz Kortner; conversely, future genre stalwart Charles McGraw's not negligible role as a high-ranking U.S. military officer is bafflingly unbilled!