36 HOURS

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE was one of my favorite television shows when I was a kid. The show, which ran from 1966 to 1973 on CBS, was an extremely popular spy program (spies were all the rage in the '60s), about a team of special agents who planned and executed an elaborate con against a bad guy in every episode. The scripts were remarkably ingenious and the emphasis on the show was on suspense, not action. The plans were always incredibly intricate and complex and were built to sustain any reversals in fortune that the team encountered. Which they inevitably did. Using high technology, make-up and penetrating insights into human character and foibles, the IMF team won the day each week but not before putting the team (and the viewers), through a twisting, tightening wringer of a plot. I loved it!

When the Tom Cruise MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE film franchise debuted in 1996, the emphasis was more on action and special effects than just the con as executed on the TV series. The films have proven to be hugely successful with six films produced to date, the latest having opened earlier this summer. I've only seen a couple of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movies (the first and GHOST PROTOCOL) and while I enjoyed them both, they weren't the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE adventures that I grew up with.

They're still fun films that more than deliver in the action department but I am here to make the case that the best MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE film ever made does not star Tom Cruise. In fact, this film was made before the television series debuted. And, the bad guys are operating the psychological con on one of the good guys.

36 HOURS (1965) is one helluva neat little spy thriller. The film stars James Garner as U.S. Army Major Jeff Pike, who knows the complete plans for the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, June 6th, 1944. The Nazis desperately want the information that is in Major Pike's head. Pike is drugged in Lisbon and wakes up in what appears to be an American Military Hospital in Germany in the year 1950. His doctor, Major Walter Gerber (Rod Taylor), explains to Pike that he's been suffering from amnesia. Nurse Anna Hedler (Eva Marie Saint), is there to tend to Pike and she eventually reveals that she is his wife. As Pike's memory starts to gel, Gerber tells him that the war is over and that the Allies won. The goal is to get Pike to open up about the invasion (which of course is now long past) and talk about the various beach heads and the date of the invasion. The Nazi high command have given Gerber 36 hours to get this information from Pike and everything is going smoothly, with Pike revealing what the Germans want to know until a freak happenstance causes Pike to tumble to what's really going on. From then it's a race against the clock to escape from the hospital and cross the border into Switzerland with Anna alongside him.

36 HOURS is short on action but long on devious plot. Written and directed by George Seaton (based on a story by Roald Dahl), the film is fiendishly clever and extraordinarily well executed. You root for good guy Garner to escape, Anna's story is gut wrenching and Taylor plays Gerber as a sympathetic man who only wants to prove that his theories about psychology are true and workable.

I've seen 36 HOURS twice over the last few years and have enjoyed it immensely both times. It's a film I was totally unfamiliar with when I first stumbled across it but it's now become one of my favorite semi-obscure WWII spy films.

Highest recommendation.