Night Train to Paris

It is so hard to take Leslie Nielsen seriously in this role. Every so often, you expect him to break into his Inspector Drebbin routine, and the movie might have been watchable if he had. Without giving any spoilers, just two sample observations:

You need a disguise, Of course you do. So you don a Grouch Marx pair of glasses complete with nose and mustache.

You want a clever subterfuge? Dress up one of the characters in a bear costume. This serves the approximate purpose of the gorilla suit in an Abbott & Costello comedy. I wonder who is in that suit now....

Life is too short to waste 90 minutes of it on this flick.

Routine thriller set on the pre Channel Tunnel boat train. Enlivened by Leslie Nielsen in pre Frank Drebbin mode. Every now and again he does something silly and you recognise the character.

This is a real "sleeper" (no pun intended), a tight, compact suspense film that really keeps moving throughout its economical running time. The cast is uniformly superb, the direction is assured and fluid, and the film is a reminder of just how many quality low-budget films were made even into the 1960s, before the collapse of the double-bill and the end of black and white as a commercial medium. Well worth looking for; I don't know if the film is available on tape. It should be.

(1964) Night Train to Paris THRILLER/ ESPIONAGE

Starring Leslie Neilson as international travel agent, Alan Holiday visited by a lady, Catherine Carrel (Aliza Gur) sent by a former friend and secret agent, Jules Lemoine (Hugh Latimer) to secretly transport an important tape cassette from the UK to Paris. It is soon revealed that the tape Alan was given was fake, and once Jules is murdered, he is then motivated to go to Paris to find out what it's all about. Lifeless, dull and pretentious with many unconvincing and unexciting moments. The only bright moments is perhaps the musical score, everything else is pretty much forgettable.

Leslie Nielsen spends most of the final third of this film pursued by a hit man while disguised in joke spectacles with a false moustache; but it's not a comedy!

The jaunty credits sequence suggested more light-hearted fare than we actually get; and despite the fact that four people get murdered the British censor still only gave it a 'U' certificate. Maybe the producers didn't let director Robert Douglas - best remembered by film buffs as a cold-eyed villain in Hollywood swashbucklers, recently turned TV director - in on the joke. This was the only feature film Douglas ever directed - plainly shot on a shoestring even by British 'B' movie standards - and I suspect this was also originally intended for TV as well; especially as the handsome fellow he brought with him from Hollywood to play the lead was also a TV mainstay at the time. (At odd moments he suggests a certain goofy comic flair that might have flourished in more adroit hands; I wonder what became of him?)

Much of the film resembles a rather talky and sub-par British 'B' of the period with the usual obtrusively loud jazz score, redeemed as usual by considerable period charm and occasionally enhanced by excellent location photography by Arthur Lavis and featuring the usual suspects like Eric Pohlmann as a ruthless killer and Cyril Raymond as a detective; neither wearing their usual moustaches, ironically.

The era it evokes now seems as remote as the silent era; with the McGuffin taking what then seemed like the incredibly high-tech form of a spool of magnetic tape containing sensitive political information.