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- Reaction score
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- Trophy Points
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36 Hours (1965)
The plot, courtesy of TV Tropes: "The film is set just before D-Day. The Germans drug and capture Major Jefferson Pike, an American intelligence officer on a mission to Lisbon. They know he was briefed on the planned time and place of the invasion. How to make him talk freely? When he wakes, he is told that he has lost all memory of the last six years. That's right, Major, it's 1950. Yes, of course the Allies won the war back in 1944. You are in a U.S. military hospital in Occupied Germany while we treat your most recent bout of amnesia. Now, as part of your therapy, tell us the last thing you remember..."
A rare 2:35:1 B&W movie - one of the last of the major studio B&W pics before color became the default? There's a good review I mostly agree with here. We're shown the full gambit from the beginning, so instead of being in protagonist James Garner's shoes, wondering why something just doesn't feel right, we're waiting for him to catch on. But while the last third is low-key in an charming, old-timey way, the main interest is the largely sympathetic rapport between Major Pike and his German captor.
Eva Marie Saint is pretty good, but her character doesn't make a lot of sense -
I watched this on a newly-pressed DVD, coinciding with a blu-ray release, and some of the exterior forest shots (from in/around Yosemite, CA) are really blurry - technical limitations of low lighting, maybe? Because most interior/hospital grounds exterior shots look great.
An early, pioneering screen example of the Faked Rip Van Winkle ploy, used numerous times in Mission: Impossible as well as TNG ("Future Imperfect") and Enterprise ("Stratagem"). I was expecting, and would have enjoyed, a more tense third act.
B
The plot, courtesy of TV Tropes: "The film is set just before D-Day. The Germans drug and capture Major Jefferson Pike, an American intelligence officer on a mission to Lisbon. They know he was briefed on the planned time and place of the invasion. How to make him talk freely? When he wakes, he is told that he has lost all memory of the last six years. That's right, Major, it's 1950. Yes, of course the Allies won the war back in 1944. You are in a U.S. military hospital in Occupied Germany while we treat your most recent bout of amnesia. Now, as part of your therapy, tell us the last thing you remember..."
A rare 2:35:1 B&W movie - one of the last of the major studio B&W pics before color became the default? There's a good review I mostly agree with here. We're shown the full gambit from the beginning, so instead of being in protagonist James Garner's shoes, wondering why something just doesn't feel right, we're waiting for him to catch on. But while the last third is low-key in an charming, old-timey way, the main interest is the largely sympathetic rapport between Major Pike and his German captor.
Eva Marie Saint is pretty good, but her character doesn't make a lot of sense -
If the Nazis can fill an whole hospital grounds full of fake Americans, can they really not do better than letting a recent concentration camp inmate share a (non-bugged!) cabin with the Major? And, in a movie where the worst torture the SS guy inflicts is mere sleep deprivation, her gang-rape/sex slave backstory/monologue is in dubious taste.
I watched this on a newly-pressed DVD, coinciding with a blu-ray release, and some of the exterior forest shots (from in/around Yosemite, CA) are really blurry - technical limitations of low lighting, maybe? Because most interior/hospital grounds exterior shots look great.
An early, pioneering screen example of the Faked Rip Van Winkle ploy, used numerous times in Mission: Impossible as well as TNG ("Future Imperfect") and Enterprise ("Stratagem"). I was expecting, and would have enjoyed, a more tense third act.
B