36 Hours (Perlberg-Seaton Productions, Cherokee Productions, MGM, 1964)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, August 8) I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies that I literally remembered from my childhood: 36 Hours, starring James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, and Rod Taylor in a quirky World War II story about an elaborate plan by an American-born German doctor, Major Walter Gerber (Rod Taylor), to deceive U.S. Major Jefferson Pike (James Garner) into giving away the Allied plans for an invasion of France. It’s well known historically that the Allies put a lot of effort into fooling the Germans that they were going to invade France at the easiest point to reach it from Britain, the Pas de Calais, when they were actually planning to make the D-Day landing at Normandy. I was turned on to 36 Hours while it was still playing in theatres by my stepfather, a World War II buff who was quite taken by the movie’s central premise: Major Pike is captured by German soldiers while on a mission to neutral Portugal, and when he came to he’s in a secret German hospital where part of his hair has been dyed grey. The idea is to fool him into thinking he has amnesia and it’s really 1950; the war has long since been won by the Allies; Hitler, Göring; and Goebbels were all conveniently blown up by a suitcase bomb; Henry Wallace is now the U.S. President; and the hospital Pike is in is part of an Allied occupation force. By getting him to reminisce about the invasion as if it were a long-since done deal, Gerber hopes to extract from Pike the information as to just where the Allies will be landing, how many troops they will have, and what their battle plans will be.

The basic premise came from a story writer Roald Dahl published in Harper’s Magazine in 1944 called “Beware of the Dog,” only in Dahl’s story the person the Germans are trying to fool is Royal Air Force pilot Peter Williamson, whom they’ve shot down in a routine raid over occupied France. Williamson has lost a leg from a cannon shell and is being cared for in a hospital he thinks is in Brighton, England but is actually in France. Williamson hears German planes flying overhead far more regularly than they would be if he were really in Brighton; he hears a nurse complaining about the “hard” mineral content of the local water when he remembered from going to school in Brighton that its water was “soft”; and the ultimate realization came when he looks out a window and sees a sign in French: “Garde au Chien” (“Beware of the Dog”). When a German pretending to be an RAF officer comes in to ask Williamson for information about the whereabouts of his squadron, Williamson refuses to say anything more than his name, rank, and serial number – all the Geneva Conventions require a captured soldier to give. (That scene is closely copied in the movie.) My husband Charles, who came home from work with about one-third of the movie to go, actually recalled reading “Beware of the Dog” either in middle school or high school as part of a textbook that explained what a short story was and offered interspersed examples. Writer-director George Seaton used Dahl’s story and another one by Carl K. Hittleman and Luis H. Vance to develop the script for 36 Hours. He counterbalanced the sympathetic German Dr. Gerber with S.S. officer Otto Schack (Werner Peters), who’s convinced Gerber’s plan won’t work in time and wants to take Pike over for what would now be called “enhanced interrogation” – i.e., torture.

Also involved in the plot is nurse Anna Hedler (Eva Marie Saint), a survivor of the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps who in order to avoid being sent back there is willing to go along with Gerber’s plot, including posing as Mrs. Pike, complete with an engagement and a wedding ring Pike had got from his mother. PIke blurts out that the Allied invasion of France took place (i.e., will take place) at Normandy, along with the code names for the five landing sites and their locations. The deus ex machina that gives the game away to Pike is a small paper cut he gets on a screen back in London while he was being briefed for his ill-fated trip to Portugal, and once he realizes the truth the movie becomes less interesting, essentially a long chase scene in which Pike and Anna Hedler flee the German hospital, which is conveniently located near the Swiss border. They have help from a couple of typically obnoxious comic-relief characters, Elsa (Celia Lovsky, wife – and by then widow – of Peter Lorre) and border guard Ernst Furzen (John Banner). Elsa is the housekeeper of a minister who’s been known to help anti-Nazi fugitives flee, but the minister himself is in Munich (clear on the other end of Germany from where they live) and she does the best she can with Furzen’s help. Furzen demands payment for his services and, since Pike and Anna have no money and he figures the war will soon end and German money will be worthless anyway, he demands the rings and Pike’s gold watch. Elsa takes the engagement ring and puts it on her own finger, and Otto Schack recognizes it and knows he’s on the right trail – only Furzen shoots him in the back and Pike and Anna arrange his body to make it look like he was the one trying to escape and Furzen shot him in the line of duty.

Frankly, the escape scenes are so reminiscent of The Sound of Music (which wouldn’t be filmed for two more years, though the story had been done on Broadway as a stage musical since 1960) one expects to see Julie Andrews and her on-screen kids traipsing through the mountains at any moment singing at the tops of their voices. 36 Hours is the annoying sort of movie that wastes a potentially fascinating premise, and part of the problem with it is James Garner. Yes, I know he not only starred in it but helped develop the project through his own company, Cherokee Productions (named in honor of his maternal grandmother, a full-blooded Cherokee – I certainly hadn’t known James Garner was part-Native until TCM host Ben Mankiewicz mentioned that in his outro!) – but there were plenty of actors around then, including Gregory Peck and Paul Newman, who could have given Pike a more subtle and nuanced reading. As for Gerber – whose backstory would have made a considerably more interesting movie than the one we have (why did a U.S.-born person of German ancestry return to Der Vaterland at age 16 and how did he become so committed to the German cause?) – he kills himself with poison when he realizes that his plot has failed and no one in the German high command believed his story about a Normandy invasion anyway, and with his dying breath he tried to dispatch Schack after giving Pike and Anna the all-important papers about his neurological research on genuine amnesia patients. 36 Hours is a quite impressive movie, but it also has its weak spots, and after the audacity of the basic concept, the film’s descent in its second half to the commonplace escape-and-pursuit conventions can’t help but be boring.

My husband Charles and I had previously watched 36 Hours on March 9, 2004, and here’s what I’d had to say about it then:

The film I picked for us was 36 Hours (Leslie Halliwell’s film guide spells out the numeral in the title, but both the actual credits and the reference in Jon Douglas Eames’ The MGM Story have it as above), a 1964 MGM World War II movie with an intriguing plot premise: Major Jefferson Pike (James Garner), one of the few men on earth who as of the end of May 1944 knows exactly where the Allies are about to launch the invasion of occupied France, is tracked to Lisbon by Nazi agents, where he’s kidnapped, given incapacitating drugs, flown to Germany and there kept in what is ostensibly an Allied occupation military hospital. The whole gimmick is the idea of German Major Gerber (Rod Taylor), who’s concocted the plan to convince Pike that it is now 1950, he’s had amnesia for the previous six years, the war has ended with an Allied victory, and therefore it’s perfectly safe for him to talk about the invasion since it has long since occurred. The premise is inventive and fascinating — though Charles recalled reading something similar in a short story and it’s possible it was one of the sources for this film (writer-director George Seaton patched his plot together from two stories, one by Roald Dahl and one by Carl Hittleman and Luis Vance) — but it’s one of those films that takes an inventive and fascinating premise and does surprisingly little with it before it falls back on the usual clichés. Among the things the film does right is detail just how Gerber creates this phony reality, including authentic-looking newspapers (Seaton devoted some thought to what sort of future a Nazi psychologist would concoct for 1950, and in it Henry Wallace is President, he’s attempting to negotiate a peaceful solution to a war with China, and as for FDR, he’s still alive and has retired to his home in Warm Springs, Georgia), a staff of hospital workers trained to speak accentless English (he threatens anyone who lapses into German with a court-martial, and in several conversations with his higher-ups he insists that they speak English to stay in practice), a thoroughly researched medical dossier of what’s supposedly happened to him during his “missing” six years, and such physical accouterments as grey hair dye and atropine in the eyes to make him need glasses. To aid him in worming the secret out of Pike, Gerber has extracted a concentration camp inmate (she started out at Auschwitz and ended up at Ravensbrück) with previous nursing experience (Eva Marie Saint, playing her role in a surprisingly Dietrichesque way), but once Pike finds out what’s really going on he’s able to get her to fall in love with him and help him escape.

The title comes from the fact that the Nazi High Command, distrusting Major Gerber’s methods, has given him only a day and a half to extract the secret from Pike, after which they are sending in an SS man (Werner Peters) to use less subtle and more brutal methods to worm the secret out of him; and one irony of the film is that even though Gerber actually gets Pike to tell them the Allied invasion is scheduled to take place at Normandy, the German generals are so convinced that it will take place at Calais they don’t believe the correct information. (Charles pointed out that throughout the war the Germans simply assumed that the Allies would take the shortest route everywhere; they were surprised when the British forces that had wrapped up the Egyptian campaign moved directly to an invasion of Italy without going to Greece first; and I’ve always been amazed at the sheer depth and scope of the British disinformation effort to fool the Germans as to the location of the D-Day invasion, to the point of hiring set-builders from the British film studios to construct fake tanks, landing craft and guns and display them across the English Channel from Calais to reinforce the German view that the Allied invasion would take place there, the way the medieval English invasions of France under Edward III and Henry V both had.) Alas, the biggest single flaw of this film is how quickly Pike finds out the secret — he remembers cutting his finger on a map back at British headquarters and notices that the cut still hasn’t healed, as it surely would have in six years! It would have been far more effective for him to notice little bits that seemed out of place and have him slowly put the truth together instead of discovering it all at once — and once he does there’s nothing more that the filmmakers can think of to end the movie but an all-too-stereotypical Mortal Storm-like chase scene in which the hero and heroine desperately flee to the Swiss border while the Nazis come after them in hot pursuit and both Gerber and the SS man end up dying. There are some welcome supporting actors in the cast — Sig Ruman (as the peasant farmer who helps them escape), Celia Lovsky (Mrs. Peter Lorre) as his wife, Martin Kosleck (as a member of the German staff), and Alan Napier (as the head of British intelligence — though he made this film two years before starting his TV role as the butler in Batman, at least both had in common that he had to be very good at keeping a major secret!) — but for the most part I feel about 36 Hours now much the way I felt about it when it was new: a provocative film but also a rather disappointing one.