NIGHT PEOPLE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 778, 18 June 1954, Page 19

NIGHT PEOPLE

(20th Century-Fox) ACK in Berlin again, I’m beginning to feel like a young Mr. Isherwood of the ’fifties, peering into every café (but with something more’ than a camera’s passive curiosity) for a post-war counterpart of Sally Bowles. I haven’t found her yet, but, only a fortnight after The Man Between, the uneasy frontier, the kidnappers, the double-dealing, the pasts you can’t be sure about are still here. As. CinemaScope, Night People has no special merit that I can see, but by the narrow, flat standards of the posttalkie, pre-deepie era it’s quite an entertaining’ film. -A young American corporal kisses his little fraulein good-night and 50 yards up the street is blackjacked and whisked off to the Soviet Zone. This much is told even before the>credit titles go up. The film proper is about the efforts of the Americans under Colonel Van Dyke (Gregory Peck) to recover the young soldier. The colonel’s invaluable assistant is his secretary (Rita Gam). The other woman in his life, of whom Miss Gam is exceedingly jealous, is apparently a former concentration camp victim (Anita Bjork), who loves no man nor ever will. She is an intermediary between East and West. But the most original ingredient in the story is the young corporal’s father (Broderick Crawford), a business tycoon who, heralded by a mighty blast from all the American politicians whose ears he can reach, arrives by air in Berlin to see that no one relaxes till son John is safe. It wouldn’t be fair to tell the end of the story-it’s not quite as interesting, actually, as I had hoped-but on the way the tycoon has to face a nice problem in values and is made to realise that, unlike home-grown kidnappers, "bloodthirsty cannibals" like the Russians can’t be bought with American dollars. The anti-Soviet angle fs, of course, the done thing, but I didn’t expect the picture of the unimaginative big-business American that the first half of the film provides. I’m bound to add, though, that in his gruff. way poppa comes right in the end. Night People, whichis produced, directed and scripted (very effectively

in the. early stages) by Nunnally Johnson, is somewhat. inconsequential in places, and its final shot--Mr. Peck in huge close-up (anything you can do I can do bigger) over a brassy patriotic tune-is pretty tasteless. But for a good part of the journey it holds the interest and has enough tension in the right places. I’m not a Peck fan, but he does a competent job in this film. Mr. Crawford also, a much more impressive actor, is up to standard. Considering her reputation, Miss Gam is not nearly as obtrusive as she might be, but of the women Miss Bjork, who had the lead in Miss Julie, is really the one to watch.