Night Train to Paris
Night Train to Paris
| 22 September 1964 (USA)
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Former OSS officer Alan Holiday, now living in London, is visited on New Year's Eve by Catherine Carrel who says she is a close friend of Jules Lemoine who served with Holiday during the war. Lemoine urgently requests that Holiday go to Paris on a secret mission. Lemoine visits and wants Alan to deliver a reel of tape which he gives him, and keeps a fake reel himself to deceive enemy agents. Lemoine is killed and the fake tape stolen. Holiday, poses as an assistant to photographer Louis Vernay, and they take three models along to further the ruse.

Reviews
MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting
BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay
Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?
Wyatt There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.
Scott LeBrun Leslie Nielsen stars as Alan Holiday, a former O.S.S. agent who now works as a P.R. man for an airline in London. One New Years' Eve, a beautiful young woman (Aliza Gur) walks into his life, wanting passage to Paris. Also involved is Alans' old friend Jules Lamoine (Hugh Latimer). He gets them on board a ski train, where they will be pretend to be a model, and an assistant to fashion photographer Louis Vernay (Andre Maranne). It's all in the name of national security, and making sure that a disc containing all-important information is delivered to the proper personage.As long as you know ahead of time not to expect a serious thriller, it's possible to derive some entertainment out of this. In reality, it's a rather goofy, hip comic twist on the spy genre that had simply exploded with the arrival of "Dr. No" two years previous. It requires Nielsen to sport one of the most ridiculous of disguises, one of those eyeglasses-fake nose-fake mustache deals. And, just to give you a further idea of what to expect, a helpful partygoer in a bear suit, whom Alan refers to as "Smokey", figures into the plot. There's no real suspense, and no real action. Even though a character dies, everything is given a light touch.The casting of Nielsen makes perfect sense given the tone of the movie, even though his career in comedy was still a good decade and a half away. He's likable enough, and the supporting cast is solid: Dorinda Stevens and Edina Ronay as models, Eric Pohlmann as a thug, Cyril Raymond as a police inspector. The female cast are all notably sexy, especially Ronay.Decent light entertainment, forgettable but mildly amusing, and appreciably brief in length, at just an hour and five minutes.Six out of 10.
Oslo Jargo (Bartok Kinski) Night Train to Paris (1964) is a bit short on the thrills or intrigue, in fact, it really has neither. The director was more interested in filling up the time with useless 60's music and boring drunks. Aliza Gur is dull as an actress. Leslie Nielsen exhibits no tough rawness as he does in television as in Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958–1961), Thriller (1960) or Kraft Suspense Theatre (1963-1965).He wears plastic black horn-rimmed glasses with attached eyebrows, large plastic nose, bushy moustache as a disguise. Yeah, stupid.For train buffs, it has a train ferry (a ship or ferry designed to carry railway vehicles). It was probably the Dover to Dunkirk line, from Britain. (It stopped in 1992 due to the opening of the Channel Tunnel).There's some cool jazz music and the intro is a nice assemblage, but that's it.Also recommended: Night Train to Munich (1940) Night Train (1959) Night Train to Lisbon (2013) Night Train to Terror (1985) Terror Train (1980)
blanche-2 "Night Train to Paris" is a British B movie that stars Leslie Nielsen back in his TV days, when he was a reliable leading man. It wasn't until later that his persona took on the comedy that gave him an incredible second career. Here he plays Alan Holiday, an ex-OSS officer living in London and now apparently working as some sort of travel agent. After a series of murders, it falls to Holiday to deliver a magnetic computer tape to Paris on New Year's Eve. The ruse employs a photographer and models on a night train. Throughout the trip, the tape is hotly pursued.This film is benign enough with neither the plot nor the execution giving Alfred Hitchcock any sleepless nights. The train scenes are well done, however.It's all pretty silly, with Nielsen donning one of those combo nose and eyeglasses jobs to disguise himself, and the tape being tossed around like an old sandwich. The standout is Edina Ronay as one of the models. Her beauty and attitude embody the '60s London. She's a real bright spot.Mindless entertainment.
robert-temple-1 Those who thought Leslie Nielsen was born with white hair and a silly expression are wrong. Sceptics will say that it is theologically impossible, but we have here incontrovertible proof in Nielsen's case of Life before Birth. (Of course, connoisseurs will have known all along that he appeared in 1956 in 'Forbidden Planet', with Walter Pidgeon, and even began acting as long ago as 1950, but that is our little secret.) The idea of Leslie Nielsen as a young leading man, as he is here, in an attempt at a spy thriller, seems too incredible. His comic talents are already emerging and he just cannot help himself, he sends up the script time and again. This film is so silly and so kitsch that it epitomises everything that was wrong with Britain in 1964. Whoever imagined for a moment that the Israeli actress Alizia Gur could conceivably be a sensuous female lead? Whatever charms she may have had (and the women in this film mostly thrust forward their busts by way of self-assertion, but it does not work very well), they are well-concealed by the hideous head band and beehive hairdo popular at that time, which were guaranteed to make any woman totally unattractive, and in this case succeeded entirely. Dorinda Stevens comes in rather late in the story and adds a much-needed touch of gravitas, but she seems to have stepped in from a serious film and joined the wrong cast of characters; this was her last feature film, so maybe she got smart. Eric Pohlmann, omnipresent in those days as a heavy, sweats and grunts here as he garottes people, never taking off his hat and trenchcoat. (Honestly, it would be more polite when murdering someone at least to take off your hat!) There is a kind of story, not much of one, but it mostly takes place on a night train to Paris (good shots of how the coaches were transferred to the ferry to Dunquerque at Dover), and there is a rather wrinkled packet containing a computer tape which gets passed around rather at random, looking increasingly as if the prop department had no budget at all. Somehow governments will rise or fall if this tape does not get to Paris, but no one seems really to believe that, and although people get killed, it is clear that they are risking their lives not for la Gloire but for the box office. At this time, films could still be made in black and white without being guaranteed box office failure as long as there were some murders. How long ago this all seems: the streets of London are empty, the train platforms are empty, there was nobody there, no waves of immigrants, no over-population, and 'fun' was simply bopping up and down with confetti in a train carriage for New Year's Eve, with alcohol being the strongest thing to take. Oh yes, Edina Ronay is in the film, very pouty lips, luxuriant hair, good figure, exuding sex appeal and a cheeky personality. Well, there are worse ways to while away a rainy afternoon. as long as your teeth are tightly clenched and you brace yourself to endure 1964 again (or for those who did not endure it, experience it for the first time in all its incredible banality).