36 Hours

Hi Aki,

We watched 36 Hours tonight, made in 1965. WW2 drama starring James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, Rod Taylor. Black and White, Panavision.

It’s May 31 1944. Garner knows the secret plans for the allied invasion. The Germans seem to believe the landing will be in Calais, but in reality it’s Normandy. But maybe the Germans are only pretending to believe it’s Calais. Garner has a contact in Lisbon who might give them a clue whether the Germans believe in Calais or are only fooling.

Garner goes to Lisbon but he is drugged, put on a truck, a plane, flown to Germany. There near the Swiss border the Germans have constructed an exact copy of a US military hospital. This is their plan, to convince Garner that it’s now 1950, the war is long over, he has had amnesia. In this way they hope to fool him into revealing the actual details of the invasion. It is a plan the Germans have used before, 18 times, without fail, but those men were simple soldiers. Garner is a top intelligence man. The SS doesn’t trust Dr Gerber (Rod Taylor) to succeed here. They give Gerber 36 hours to find out; then the torturers will go to work.

Gerber has Garner’s hair dyed to look older, puts drops in his eyes to make him need glasses. Garner wakes up and is disoriented, and at first the plan is working out well. Gerber is helped by nurse Anna (Eva Marie Saint) who pretends to be Garner’s nurse as well as wife.

Garner is totally fooled. He gives away the plans in great detail. Then…

…Then he finds he has a paper cut on his finger. He got that paper cut the night before he left for Lisbon. Desperately he tries to unravel the mystery. In a couple easy ways he gets it. He threatens Anna and she tells him the truth. She was in a concentration camp, she agreed to anything to get out, she was a nurse, she spoke English, so she was brought into this plot.

Garner gets Anna to help him. She tells Gerber and the SS man that Garner has escaped, that he knows the truth, has seen through them from the start.

Garner is captured and brought to the SS. But first Gerber talks to him. Gerber (in an unbelievable scene they try to sell as well as they can) reveals he created this amnesia gag at first to help German soldiers shell-shocked coming back from the Russian front. And over the months, studying Garner’s file, he has come to know and like him. And he’s not only sorry for what Garner will now face, but Gerber is still unconvinced that Garner was lying when he told them the invasion would be Normandy.

Shock, the SS man, has no such thoughts. He believes the invasion is most likely to come at Calais because that is where the high command thinks it will come.

For a couple days, Garner (and Anna, because Shock finds out that Anna betrayed them) are tortured. The torture is this: they are put in comfortable chairs for a few hours. Yes, the comfy chair!!!

Meanwhile the Allied Command knows Garner has been taken, and they don’t know if he can stand being tortured. They know he will try to sell the Germans on the idea it will be Calais. So they arrange for German spies in England to be fed clues that it will be Calais on June 7 though in fact it is set for Normandy June 5.

When this fake intelligence makes it down the German command, and Shock tells Garner, ‘We know it’s Calais,’ then Garner seems to give up. They release him and put him and Anna in a suite of rooms in a castle on very comfy beds. Yes, the comfy beds!!!

When Garner wakes up, he sees the clock-calendar. It’s early hours of June 5 so he relaxes and tells Anna that it’s too late for the Germans, he and she have made it. The invasion is already beginning.

In walks Gerber who has had the room bugged. ‘Oh, this clock is set ahead, by the way. It’s only 11.42 – June 4. And you were telling the truth about Normandy, eh? Glad to hear it.’

Gerber sends the information by courier to the top general in the area to be delivered personally, but the courier instead gives it to Shock.

But meanwhile the dawn of June 5 comes … and no invasion. (This is a clever use of history; the invasion was set for the fifth, but bad weather made them put it off. Everybody knew it was going to be 5 or 6 or 7 because that was the dark of the moon and the tide was right.)

So Gerber is now totally discredited, even though to be a traitor. Gerber knows he has nothing to lose, so he helps Garner and Anna escape. He stays behind and is arrested. He injects himself with poison to cheat the SS guys even being able to torture him or shoot him.

Garner and Anna go cross country to the Minister in the nearby town. This man has helped American flyers get across the border, but he’s out of town. Still his housekeeper helps them. She puts them in contact with a fat, old, very comical and cynical Home Guard border patrol man (Sig Ruman, later to be famous as ‘Sergeant Schultz’ on TV). For some money he will help them.

But Garner has mentioned this minister in the talks with Gerber and the SS man before Garner realized that they were Germans. The SS man goes to the minister’s house, gets the plan out of the housekeeper, and arrests Garner and Anna just this side of the border. He intends not to take them back but to shoot them. But he gets shot himself, by the Home Guard comedian, who helps Garner and Anna get away, and drapes Shock’s body over the fence as though he had been shot trying to escape.

In Switzerland Anna and Garner say farewell. He is bound back to London, she for an internment camp for refugees. She finally manages to cry with relief, for the first time since her brutal treatment in the concentration camp took away her last tears. The two cars drive away, parting at a fork in the road, and the credits roll.

The movie is based on a Roald Dahl story. But here’s the interesting thing, in the credits in big letters it says, Based on ‘Beware the Dog’ by Roald Dahl then in small letters it says, Also on a story by X and Y (I can’t remember those names).

So here is my guess: the basic premise, of the fake amnesia, the ‘doctor’ trying to get him to ‘remember’ 6 years that haven’t actually happened yet, etc. – this is in Roald Dahl’s story. It’s very clever, and the story probably starts with our hero waking up. Confused. How did I get here? Kind of stuff. Then ‘Why do I look older? Why do I need glasses now? what’s this date on the paper – 1950?!?’

The doctors come in, and try to help him.

He gives away the place and troop disposition of the invasion.

Then he figures it out, by a clever means (probably the paper cut gag, though that seems to rely a bit too much on accident to me). And now he must fool the ‘doctor’ into believing that he was onto them from the beginning.

It’s all a game of psychology, faking, convincing, lying.

There is the hero, the doctor, maybe a torturer too. But probably just hero and doctor (maybe another doctor).

There are no girls and no romance and no thrilling escape.

This would have been a good:

• play
• live TV drama
• intense movie (the kind that we were taught makes a good debut feature: ‘2 guys in a room talking’ kind of feature)

It does not make a good wide-screen big-name movie from MGM using all the props they have on hand from the other WW2 movies they were making at the time.

So, in adapting, I imagine that the producers said something like, ‘We need a GIRL! We need ROMANCE! We need ACTION! We need the guy not just to fool the Nazis and get killed, or go into prison camp like in the Dahl story, we need him to ESCAPE!’

And they pulled in this cheap pulp story of a guy hooking up with a woman who was being used by the Nazis after getting out of concentration camp, and the cynical border guard, all that stuff. Everything cheap and bad about the movie, in other words, comes from:

• this second pulp story
• introductory material setting up the problem (the part about sending Garner to Lisbon, and the scenes in Lisbon)
• and whatever else the producers thought would make for better box-office

But of course the only scenes that work in the movie are those that come from the Dahl story. And it starts to go wrong as soon as we have to build up the girl and she says she is married to Garner. This is preposterous of course. And as soon as he figures it out, he starts acting in pulp action-hero manner, threatening the girl, running, fighting – crap.

Where does the sympathetic portrayal of Dr Gerber come in I wonder? This part almost seems as though it doesn’t come from either story, but is instead a condition of getting a big name star to play the part. ‘Rod Taylor doesn’t want to play a Nazi, man! He wants to be a good guy! All the potential stars for this part don’t want it! We gotta sweeten the deal but we can’t PAY more; anyway money isn’t the problem. Hey how about we make him a GOOD Nazi, not a bad one? He can even have good motives for his work, and he can help Garner escape! Oh, he’ll do it now? Great, baby, great!’

The biggest problem lies in how the introductory big-budget stuff and the later crappy escape stuff crowd in on the core of the movie, the scenes of convincing, being fooled, catching on, trying to trick back, trying to convince them. This is the only part that is suspenseful or interesting. As soon as Garner says ‘Normandy’ and goes on to give all the code-names for the beaches, and tell what troops will be landing on what beaches, it really got me going. ‘How is he going to take this back? He can’t kill them, it wouldn’t do any good, they have passed on the words already. He’s going to have to fool them back, and how on earth is he going to do THAT?’ – That’s what went through my mind, I was all excited to see how they were going to handle.

You can’t imagine my disappointment as we move into the laughable ‘Torture in the comfy chairs!’ part, and the crappy, too-easy, escape.

(5 May 2009)