Berlin Express (RKO, 1948)

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

Last night (Saturday, September 27) I watched Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” presentation on Turner Classic Movies of what he called a “rubble movie,” Berlin Express (1948). It was billed as the first American film shot as well as set in occupied Germany after World War II, beating Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair into theatres by four months. It’s also not that good a movie, despite the presence of some major talents both behind and in front of the cameras. The director was Jacques Tourneur; the original story was by Curt Siodmak (Robert’s brother and author of Donovan’s Brain and the script for the 1941 The Wolf Man); the script was by Harold Medford; and the cinematographer was Lucien Ballard (then husband of the film’s leading lady, Merle Oberon, and one she particularly wanted to use because he’d developed a way of lighting her that covered up the facial scars she’d got from a 1937 car crash that led her previous husband, Alexander Korda, to pull the plug on Josef von Sternberg’s film of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius). According to Muller, RKO producer Bert Granet got carte blanche on this one. Having just cast the ordinarily sympathetic Laraine Day as a psychotic villainness in The Locket (1946) and had a surprise hit, Granet cast Oberon as Lucienne Mirbeau, a Frenchwoman who fled the Occupation and ended up as secretary to an influential German refugee, Dr. Heinrich Bernhardt (Paul Lukas – when I saw his name in the cast list I was momentarily unsure whether he was going to be playing a Nazi, as in Confessions of a Nazi Spy and The Lady Vanishes, or an anti-Nazi, as he was in Watch on the Rhine; it turned out he was an anti-Nazi). Dr. Bernhardt is being sent back to Germany to lead a postwar conference in occupied Berlin to see if there’s a way to reunite Germany as one country under civilian anti-Nazi rule, only unrepentant Nazis are out to kill him before they can do that.

The film features a third-person narration by Paul Stewart, best known as Raymond the butler in Citizen Kane, after Granet decided all the radio announcers he voice-tested sounded wrong. He briefly considered using Robert Ryan, but that proved unsuitable because Ryan was also in the film as the male lead, U.S. agronomist Robert Lindley, and while it might have been a good idea to rewrite the narration so it was being delivered in the first person by Ryan’s character, Granet decided not to go there and instead hired Stewart as narrator. Stewart’s main function seems to be to outline the political situation in Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II and also to give us the full names of the characters, who are identified in the credits by one name alone (usually their last, but sometimes the first). The film actually starts out in Paris and puts the main characters onto a train bound first for Frankfurt and then for Berlin (one wonders why the roundabout route). They are Lindley; Britisher James Sterling (Robert Coote); Frenchman Henri Perrot (Charles Korvin); and Russian Lt. Maxim Viroshilov (Roman Toporow, an odd actor who was a refugee from Poland; according to Muller, Granet and Tourneur had to get him a special visa to be able to travel to Germany to make Berlin Express, and he only got to do two more movies, The Red Danube and MGM’s adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim as a vehicle for Errol Flynn, though he lived until 1993). On the train to Frankfurt a bomb goes off in Dr. Bernhardt’s train compartment and he’s presumed dead, but it turns out he wasn’t killed: a decoy, a heavy-set bodyguard who looked nothing like Paul Lukas, died in the explosion instead. Lukas’s character then “outs” himself as the real Dr. Bernhardt, and the struggle becomes to find out, apprehend and arrest the neo-Nazis who tried to kill him on the train and are presumably still gunning for him.

Berlin Express is a well-done chase-and-pursuit film but it has its flaws. For one thing, most of it takes place amidst the ruins of Frankfurt – it’s not until the closing reel that the train, and the action, actually finally get to Berlin. Granet joked that using the actual German ruins saved him $65 million in set-building costs, and the bombed-out rubble we see on screen today looks way too much like the actual ruins we see on the news every day from Ukraine and Gaza. The film becomes a series of barely connected action scenes in which the characters try to avoid the diehard Nazi assassins (they are referred to as the “Underground,” a bit jarring for audiences who are used to hearing the word “Underground” in a World War II movie in a positive context to mean partisan resisters against the Nazis) out to kill Bernhardt. Among the places they look is an underground cabaret that’s been declared off limits to U.S. servicemembers. The cabaret features two strong men and two clowns, one of whom is part of the Nazi ring while another (at least it seemed to me) to be on the side of good. It also features a woman (Marie Hayden) who not only performs as a mind reader but also sings a song written by Frederick Hollander, t/n Friedrich Holländer, German composer and songwriter whom Marlene Dietrich brought to the U.S. after the success of her role and his songs in the 1930 film The Blue Angel. Originally there was also supposed to be a dance number in the cabaret, but it wasn’t used in the final cut even though Charles O’Curran still got credit for directing it. The good guys trace the bad guys to a brewery in Frankfurt and Lindley ends up trapped inside a beer barrel (though we’re not sure whether the liquid in it is water, beer, or something even more noxious), where he fights and chokes to death one of the bad guys. There’s also a sequence in which Dr. Bernhardt is lured out of hiding by his old friend Prof. Walther (Reinhold Schünzel), only it’s a trap. Walther had actually been talked into betraying his best friend by the neo-Nazi bad guys, one of whom had promised Walther a reunion with his long-“disappeared” wife if he ratted out Bernhardt. When Walther learns that his wife had been dead all along, he hangs himself.

When the principals finally get on the train from Frankfurt to Berlin, Lindley deduces that the supposed Frenchman Perrot is the real assassin. The facts that lead Lindley to that conclusion include Perrot’s knowledge that the bomb used to kill Bernhardt’s decoy had been rewired from a hand grenade, and the fact that Perrot had pretended not to know Frankfurt and not to speak German, when he did. Lindley sees a reflection from another train’s window of Perrot attempting to strangle Bernhardt in his compartment – which briefly confused me because it looked like it was happening on another train and I wondered how Lindley was going to get from one train to the other, especially when they were both moving, to rescue Herr Professor. Ultimately Lindley breaks up Perrot’s attempted assassination of Bernhardt, the police of the various occupying authorities duly arrest Perrot, and there’s a weird tag scene that marks this movie as a product of the brief period between the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War when it looked like collaboration between the World War II allies might still be possible. Among the things that happen in this brief, bittersweet sequence is Lindley offering Viroshilov his phone number (written on a slip of paper, as everyone had to do it in the days before cell phones) and the Russian at first throws it away, then thinks better of it and picks it up again.

Berlin Express is an O.K. movie; Wilder’s A Foreign Affair is better (I watched it with Charles in 2010 and wrote about it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/05/foreign-affair-paramount-1948.html), especially in the superb casting of Marlene Dietrich as the former mistress of a Nazi bigwig who’s in hiding and the Allies are trying to use his jealousy to flush him out in the open. Where A Foreign Affair went wrong is the inept casting of John Lund in the male lead; Wilder essentially wrote a Jack Lemmon role before Lemmon was around to play it. The film Eddie Muller had shown the previous week, the German-made The Murderers Are Among Us, reviewed by me on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2025/09/the-murderers-are-among-us-deutsche.html, was better than either of its American-made counterparts: a rich exploration of war guilt and the survivors’ traumas, though the best-known of what Muller called the “rubble movies” is The Third Man (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-third-man-alexander-korda.html) even though the ruins it was set among were those of Vienna instead of Berlin or Frankfurt. (A year after shooting The Third Man and winning an Academy Award for it, cinematographer Robert Krasker was assigned to do the British-made Another Man’s Poison, a thriller co-starring Bette Davis and her last husband, Gary Merrill. Davis was not happy with the way Krasker was making her look, and at one point she asked just what Krasker had won his Oscar for. “For shooting ruins!” she was told.) I’d seen Berlin Express before – indeed, I believe I’d had a VHS pre-record on it – and unlike some movies, it didn’t look any better to me this time around than it had before. It’s a deeply flawed movie whose main attraction now, as I’m sure it was then as well, is seeing the rubble Allied bombing had left behind after multiple air raids on German cities.