Well Deserved Praise

The greatest movie ever made..!

All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

Gregory Peck "almost always played courageous, nobly heroic good guys who saw injustice and fought it."(IMDb)And from the very start as his debut (Tourneur's "days of glory" ) shows.I cannot remember him playing a villain.A GI was kidnapped in Germany during his military service (it was a time when conscripts trusted their superiors,which was not that way in the late sixties;see the scene with the girlfriend );we do not exactly who abducted him:Russians or former Nazis.Peck portrays an officer who may seem cold and indifferent at first sight.The boy's father is a wealthy man who believes that money can buy anything: "your money does not mean anything here" says Peck .They have to deal with "night people" in the cold war.The most interesting side of the movie is:shall we exchange innocent (and even heroic) people for an unfortunate rich kid?Which makes Charles Leatherby(Broderick Crawford) the most endearing character of the movie.The selfish millionaire discovers compassion and sacrifice.The ending of the movie,on the other hand ,is too implausible to convince.Hoffy (Anita Bjork) is only an amateur and her bosses should have known better.

It seems that someone pulled the plug on 1954's "Night People." There is a very good plot here about a young American soldier being kidnapped by the Communists in post-World War 11 East Germany. Broderick Crawford, in his usual tough no nonsense portrayals, comes to Berlin to make sure that no one is goofing off on getting his son free as well as to show that his a lot of political ties.What I found interesting here is that the usual gang buster Crawford quiets down and even changes his opinion once he finds out the elements of the entire story. Seems that the East Germans want to exchange his son for an elderly couple, the wife was British and the husband was a German army official, blinded by the Nazis. Appears that the British wife was informing allied intelligence of Nazi activities during the war.Peck is in his usual fine form as someone seeking justice and finding out along the way that his German female assistant is not everything she was cracked up to be.The film needs to have excitement with such a plot but we don't get it at all. Even the drinking of the poison is not shown with any zest at all.

Gregory Peck plays a U.S. Army Provost caught up in exchanging a married couple wanted by Russians for a captured American soldier in "Night People," set in post-war Berlin. By today's standards, this film is on the talky side, with not much action. Although the script was nominated for an Oscar, it's problematic - the denouement was much too simple, for one thing.Broderick Crawford is the father of the captured soldier, and he does an excellent job. Rita Gam is Ricky, Peck's beautiful and feisty secretary. There are several TV faces as well: Buddy Ebsen, Walter Abel, and Max Showalter. Anita Bjork is "Hoffy," a woman who works for Peck yet may be playing both ends.But the film is really Peck's, who does a fantastic job creating an interesting, tough, passionate, decisive, and funny character. He's instantly both likable and admirable.

Maybe not a barn-burner, but definitely worth seeing because of Peck. The movie actually captures quite well the tradecraft and moral dilemmas of counterespionage, and the scenes between Peck and Crawford are first-rate. Berlin locations add to the authenticity of this forgotten little movie.