Carol Reed was inspired by Hitchcock's successful The Lady Vanishes, and borrowed both of that film's writers (Sidney Gilliat, Frank Launder) and its oddball cricket obsessed fans comic duo (Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne) to create this most entertaining wartime spy thriller. It's based on the novel Report on a Fugitive by Gordon Wellesley.
"Munich" is set in September of 1939, just as the Nazis invade Czechoslovakia. Armor-plating inventor Dr Axel Bomasch (James Harcourt) flees to England by plane, but his daughter Anna (Margaret Lockwood) gets arrested and is sent to a concentration camp just outside of Prague. There she's befriended by prisoner Karl Marsen (Paul Henreid), and he arranges for their escape to England. She doesn't realize it was an organized escape so the Nazis can get her to lead them to her father and that Marsen is a Nazi agent. When Nazi agents in England capture both father and daughter at their resort retreat, crack British undercover intelligence agent Gus Bennett (Rex Harrison) dons a disguise as a German major in an Engineering Corps and comes to their aid by infiltrating the German high-command. Bennett must rescue them before their train reaches Munich...
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