Trieste Express

One of the movies that kept showing up on the list of recommendations Tubi was giving me is a British film I hadn't heard of but that sounded interesting enough: Sleeping Car to Trieste. It turns out there's a reason it sounded interesting.

The movie starts off in Paris, at the embassy of an unnamed country. A mysterious figure breaks into a safe there during an official function, but that man, Zurta (Albert Lieven), is spotted, and has to kill the servant who spots him. Zurta and his partner Valya (Jean Kent) flee with the diary they've taken, and hand it off to another man, Poole; the three are apparently supposed to meet again someplace else to return the diary, which we can guess contains some sort of secrets like the ones Albert Basserman held in his head in Foreign Correspondent.

But Poole decides that holding on to the diary is worth more than the payoff he's supposed to get from Zurta and Valya, and that he could play various countries off one another. To that end, he boards what would have been the Orient Express in the days before World War II, although after the war it was rather less glamorous. The route the train took in those days went through Trieste, a city that's now part of Italy but for several years after World War II was part of a nominally independent city-state region called Istria. Indeed, I've mentioned this before in conjunction with the movie Diplomatic Courier which is set in Trieste. As a city-state and with its location, it was more or less open to people from every side of the international intrigue game and thus a natural location to fence that diary.

Zurta and Valya figure out that Poole has taken the Orient Express, where Poole is looking for a place to avoid being detected by either Zurta and Valya on the one hand, and the authorities on the other. The train has a plethora of passengers, although they're mostly not quite as glamorous or full of intrigue as other deptictions of the Orient Express. There's MacBain (Finlay Currie), a Scottish writer going to deliver a lecture who is extremely overbearing and treats his assistant like dirt; a couple on a romantic tryst who are married to other people; a friend of the man in that tryst; a bird-watcher who won't shut up; and so on. Murders happen in an attempt to find that diary, and it's up to the French police to find the murderer.

The reason all of this seems vaguely familiar is that Sleping Car to Trieste is a remake of an earlier and also relatively unknown British movie that I blogged about a few years back, Rome Express. Both of them are entertaining enough but also of a type where it's easy to forget the details of exactly what happened such that watching it again is worthwhile. I'd have to watch Rome Express again to decide which of the two versions I like more, but in any case both of them are worth a watch or three.