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After Major Jefferson Pike (Garner) receives a final briefing on the Normandy invasion, he high-tails it to Lisbon to meet an informant, only to be drugged and kidnapped by the Third Reich. It’s an impressive sequence in which the musical score metamorphoses midway through a jauntier one in the vein of a light-hearted spy thriller to something far more dangerous and foreboding, underlining the dueling tones of the movie itself. The phony American hospital where Pike is unknowingly imprisoned becomes a big soundstage, essentially, with all manner of extras in one enormous show featuring Major Walter Gerber (Rod Taylor) as director, and Anna Hedler (Eva Marie Saint) as leading lady in the role of both Pike’s nurse and wife, and SS agent Schack (Werner Peters) as the megalomaniacal producer. Indeed, Schack is dubious of Gerber’s methods from the get-go, giving the Major a 36-hour window to extract the information they need before he will intervene and employ more traditional methods of torture. When Pike discovers the truth, however, he must quickly strategize to mislead his captors to ensure the invasion of Normandy goes forward without a hitch.
Gerber does not buy his prisoner’s subterfuge, though Schack does, and so “36 Hours” also utilizes the foregone conclusion of D-Day and Schack’s cocksure insistence that Normandy can’t possibly be the landing place to portray the Germans as hard-headed, oblivious idiots. That goes even further when Pike eventually makes his escape in the company of Anna, helped along the way by Ernst Furzen (John Banner), a border guard in the German national militia. Accepting a bribe to help them cross the border into Switzerland, Furzen is as corrupt as he is laughingly disenchanted with those ostensibly in charge of him, mocking the Fuhrer and plugging Schack in the back when he comes after the escapees before spitting on the dead body. It’s a character that cuts the whole regime down to size, more so than Gerber anyway, who initially comes across insidious in the way he ingratiates himself with Pike to acquire information before the truth is revealed and both men evince grudging respect for one another as men merely doing their jobs. A N*zi doing his job is still, like, you know, a N*zi.
Indeed, it’s a bit telling that Pike shrugs off Gerber’s betrayal but seethes at Anna’s. She, however, has more reason to be angry than anyone, forcibly drafted from a concentration camp and told she will go back if she does not aid their cause. And that brings us Eva Marie Saint, who recently died at the age of 102, and was the reason I watched “36 Hours” in the first place. When her character is initially excoriated by Pike, Marie Saint has Anna remain utterly neutral, like the pain she has endured has not only numbed her but is beyond anything he can possibly comprehend. If “36 Hours” portrays its N*zis as idiots and evilly banal bureaucrats, Anna’s monologue in the middle of their escape reminds you just how abominable they really are. Marie Saint’s delivery of it is cold, clinical, and through the prism of time, comes across like an Old Hollywood moment hinting at the New. What really stayed with me, though, was an earlier moment before Pike has gleaned his reality, still under the impression she is his wife. As he and Anna converse, Seaton films it so that she is in the foreground with her back to him, glancing at him over her shoulder, trying to detect if he detects anything amiss, playing the part while simultaneously let the toll of doing so seep through.
Gerber does not buy his prisoner’s subterfuge, though Schack does, and so “36 Hours” also utilizes the foregone conclusion of D-Day and Schack’s cocksure insistence that Normandy can’t possibly be the landing place to portray the Germans as hard-headed, oblivious idiots. That goes even further when Pike eventually makes his escape in the company of Anna, helped along the way by Ernst Furzen (John Banner), a border guard in the German national militia. Accepting a bribe to help them cross the border into Switzerland, Furzen is as corrupt as he is laughingly disenchanted with those ostensibly in charge of him, mocking the Fuhrer and plugging Schack in the back when he comes after the escapees before spitting on the dead body. It’s a character that cuts the whole regime down to size, more so than Gerber anyway, who initially comes across insidious in the way he ingratiates himself with Pike to acquire information before the truth is revealed and both men evince grudging respect for one another as men merely doing their jobs. A N*zi doing his job is still, like, you know, a N*zi.
Indeed, it’s a bit telling that Pike shrugs off Gerber’s betrayal but seethes at Anna’s. She, however, has more reason to be angry than anyone, forcibly drafted from a concentration camp and told she will go back if she does not aid their cause. And that brings us Eva Marie Saint, who recently died at the age of 102, and was the reason I watched “36 Hours” in the first place. When her character is initially excoriated by Pike, Marie Saint has Anna remain utterly neutral, like the pain she has endured has not only numbed her but is beyond anything he can possibly comprehend. If “36 Hours” portrays its N*zis as idiots and evilly banal bureaucrats, Anna’s monologue in the middle of their escape reminds you just how abominable they really are. Marie Saint’s delivery of it is cold, clinical, and through the prism of time, comes across like an Old Hollywood moment hinting at the New. What really stayed with me, though, was an earlier moment before Pike has gleaned his reality, still under the impression she is his wife. As he and Anna converse, Seaton films it so that she is in the foreground with her back to him, glancing at him over her shoulder, trying to detect if he detects anything amiss, playing the part while simultaneously let the toll of doing so seep through.
