Irene212

All hail, Sean Connery, who did most of his own stunts in the movie, which include a long sequence when he's on top of a train going up to 50mph, barely dodging low bridges along the way. Just watching Connery in genuine peril is by far the most memorable part of the movie.

The plot sounds good on paper, but Michael Crichton's success as a novelist is more about his ideas than his artistic skills, and he doesn't have notable gifts as a director. Praise goes to Geoffrey Unsworth for the photography and Anthony Mendelson for costumes, both of which amuse the eye, which is crucial because there isn't much to amuse the ear.

The plot plods along until literally picking up speed on the train. Connery plans to steal a shipment of gold bars during transport from London to Folkestone. He has a cohort of three: his mistress (Lesley-Anne Down) who is introduced in a bodysuit corset but allowed dignity for the rest of the movie; an elaborately mustachioed safe-cracker (Donald Sutherland), whose comic chops aren't quite up to par for the role; and a convict (Wayne Sleep) who is given a lot of screen time considering his minimal participation in the heist.

I don't know how much freedom the veteran editor David Bretherton was given, but this is far from his best work. Fifteen or twenty minutes could easily have been cut from the 1h50m runtime-- including the savage and gratuitous scene of a blood sport common in London in the 19th century: ratting. Like cockfighting, gamblers bet on trained terriers to kill rats in a rat pit. Thanks to the RSPCA, it was eradicated by the end of the century.

Human complexity shines through "Hotel Berlin," which is a far cry from Hollywood's propagandistic WWII movies. Though it was written fully two years before the fall of Berlin, the story correctly anticipates Germany's inevitable surrender. In fact, it predates the US Army film, "Nazi Concentration Camps," which was introduced as evidence of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials on 29 November 1945, and which is widely considered the first American movie to expose the Nazi death camps-- but Dachau and human experimentation are both mentioned in "Hotel Berlin," which was released months earlier, on 2 March 1945, just nine weeks before Germany's surrender. So the prescient author of the 1943 novel, Vicki Baum, could read the handwriting on the wall: Allies had been bombing Berlin since mid-1940, and in September of '43 the Nazi regime began evacuating civilians from the city.

The most stunningly prescient element of her book is her character General von Dahnwitz (Raymond Massey in the film). From the book: "When he and a small group of high officers had entered into a conspiracy for overthrowing the present High Command they had planned well, and he could see no fault in their strategy. But they had lost all the same. Keith and Fredendorff had taken the consequences, and now it was his turn." Baum created von Dahnwitz and co-conspirator Baron von Stetten (Henry Daniell) the year before there actually was such a conspiracy: Operation Valkyrie, the failed 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler's life which resulted in the execution of four conspirators. In both the book and movie, Von Dahnwitz opts for preemptive suicide. By the way, screenwriters Jo Pagano and Alvah Bessie are often wrongly credited with adding the Operation Valkyrie idea, but it was Baum's. They did, however, substantially change other elements of her novel.

The hotel is occupied by Nazis, headed by George Coulouris as Joachim Helm, a ruthless SS-Gruppenführer at least until he is thrown down an elevator shaft by resistance leader Martin Richter (Helmut Dantine) with help from a pageboy unfortunately named Adolf (Richard Tyler). Alan Hale uses none of his considerable comic chops to play Plottke, and he's given a Nazi uniform (in the book, he's a thieving old Nazi party horse being squeezed by Helm). Kurt Kreuer plays a major who is played like a fiddle by a famous actress and Nazi sympathizer, Lisa Dorn (Andrea King).

Dorn is one of two key female characters, look-alikes who couldn't be more opposite. Tillie Weiler (Faye Emerson, showing impressive range), is an informant for the Allies who a hotel resident who has been reduced to prostitution. She was in love with Sim Baruch, a Jewish man who dies in the book but lives in the film, and there is a strongly flavored scene between Tillie and with his mother Frau Baruch (a wonderful Helene Thimig).

The main action centers on Richter, who knows that he was allowed to escape from Dachau so the SS could use him to track down other members of the resistance. In the hotel, he reunites with a friend from Dachau, the scientist Johannes Koenig (Peter Lorre), who is a broken man, a drunk after having been forced to experiment on people (in the book, Koenig was "the Reich's great poet"). The most powerful scene in the film is their long conversation, questioning if there are any good Germans, or indeed any good people, left on Earth. "Incurable," Koenig judges mankind.

Be sure to see a restored print. The Technicolor process was essentially experimental, and in degraded prints, the hues are garish and tend to bleed into each other, and the faces are feverishly red-- an insult to the care taken during the filming and processing. Unlike the many filmmakers who went a little nuts adding dialog and music after "The Jazz Singer" introduced sound, Rouben Mamoulian introduced color with subtle artistry.

That said, I wonder how "Becky Sharp" would have been received if it had been filmed in black-and-white. The famous scene when the cannon fire that starts Battle of Waterloo interrupts a formal ball is effectively filmed and edited, and he elicits strong performances from Cedric Hardwick, Alan Mowbray, and especially comically lovable Nigel Bruce as the men who lust after Becky-- which is a problem because Becky is played by Miriam Hopkins, who does not do justice to Thackeray's conniving little anti-heroine.

Hopkins got her only Oscar nomination for the role, but she was a poor film actress in her early career. Her theatrical roots were always showing, and she lacked the discipline for close-ups: her eyebrows have a peculiar tendency to move up and down when she delivers dialog and, although she never made a silent film, she overacts like Pauline in peril. It doesn't help that Becky is a despicable character who is in almost every scene. At least her elaborate hairdos and many flouncy glittery gowns distract from the amateurish performance.