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Night Boat to Dublin (1946)
Feb. 26th, 2024 08:55 amWatched this one as part of my ongoing hobby of “watching Robert Newton in movies that are not Treasure Island.” He plays the hero in this one: military-intelligence officer Capt. David Grant who’s searching for a kidnapped scientist and infiltrating a (rather small, from what we see of it) spy ring, and whose first assignment for said spy ring is marrying an Austrian refugee (Muriel Pavlow) who needs British citizenship and a new, less notorious last name.
Newton’s good, but I still wondered why they had cast him, specifically-- until the scene where we realize that his plan was not only to get himself hired by suspect Paul Faber’s law firm, but to almost immediately get caught out as an eminently blackmailable army deserter. Newton can do shame-faced and louche like nobody’s business.
I suspect the title was meant to evoke Night Train to Munich (1940)—the night boat to (and from) Dublin is a setting, but only in the first reel or so. It’s a pretty tight little espionage thriller—maybe too tight: it seemed to me that the script kept bringing up interesting plot details and then just not exploring them. For example, after the scene where our hero’s new wife confides to him about her nazi uncle and spy brother, I kept waiting for there to be at least some tension over whether or not this display of honesty was a double-bluff, but the topic never came up. Then again, Newton’s character hadn’t been planning to tell her about his mission anyway (he hadn’t expected to ever see her again after the registry office) so I suppose her family makes no difference to his plans, except that now he has to stash her in the adjacent room and make her breakfast the next day. Well, he doesn’t have to make her breakfast, but he does, even if he burns the toast and the coffee is hard to distinguish from tea. After all, she patched up the bullet-graze on his arm the night before.
I sort of like that the movie doesn’t overtly pair them up; they clearly fall into a comfortable domesticity almost immediately, but they never kiss and maybe some time after the closing scene they’ll consider giving this marriage thing a whirl or maybe they’ll divorce amicably, and either way he may or may not have to tell her he was there for her brother’s execution by firing squad, but right now they’ve got bigger things to worry about.
As the spy Faber, Raymond Lovell has one of the oddest accents I’ve heard in a movie—it sounds like he’s going for British with a German accent that keeps threatening to slip out but usually manages to stay disguised as trouble pronouncing the letter “r.” According to the internet the actor was originally from Montreal, so this has to have been a deliberate choice, but everybody else acts like they don't notice. Guy Middleton is in this movie mainly to supply banter. Herbert Lom is there to pull a gun. Valentine Dyall is supposed to be somewhere in the cast, but I didn't spot him. Brenda Bruce makes the most of her one scene, as a minion (Leslie Dwyer)’s wife who really wants a fur coat.
Newton’s good, but I still wondered why they had cast him, specifically-- until the scene where we realize that his plan was not only to get himself hired by suspect Paul Faber’s law firm, but to almost immediately get caught out as an eminently blackmailable army deserter. Newton can do shame-faced and louche like nobody’s business.
I suspect the title was meant to evoke Night Train to Munich (1940)—the night boat to (and from) Dublin is a setting, but only in the first reel or so. It’s a pretty tight little espionage thriller—maybe too tight: it seemed to me that the script kept bringing up interesting plot details and then just not exploring them. For example, after the scene where our hero’s new wife confides to him about her nazi uncle and spy brother, I kept waiting for there to be at least some tension over whether or not this display of honesty was a double-bluff, but the topic never came up. Then again, Newton’s character hadn’t been planning to tell her about his mission anyway (he hadn’t expected to ever see her again after the registry office) so I suppose her family makes no difference to his plans, except that now he has to stash her in the adjacent room and make her breakfast the next day. Well, he doesn’t have to make her breakfast, but he does, even if he burns the toast and the coffee is hard to distinguish from tea. After all, she patched up the bullet-graze on his arm the night before.
I sort of like that the movie doesn’t overtly pair them up; they clearly fall into a comfortable domesticity almost immediately, but they never kiss and maybe some time after the closing scene they’ll consider giving this marriage thing a whirl or maybe they’ll divorce amicably, and either way he may or may not have to tell her he was there for her brother’s execution by firing squad, but right now they’ve got bigger things to worry about.
As the spy Faber, Raymond Lovell has one of the oddest accents I’ve heard in a movie—it sounds like he’s going for British with a German accent that keeps threatening to slip out but usually manages to stay disguised as trouble pronouncing the letter “r.” According to the internet the actor was originally from Montreal, so this has to have been a deliberate choice, but everybody else acts like they don't notice. Guy Middleton is in this movie mainly to supply banter. Herbert Lom is there to pull a gun. Valentine Dyall is supposed to be somewhere in the cast, but I didn't spot him. Brenda Bruce makes the most of her one scene, as a minion (Leslie Dwyer)’s wife who really wants a fur coat.
