Night People

Night People is a 1954 American thriller film directed, produced and co-written by Nunnally Johnson and starring Gregory Peck, Broderick Crawford, Anita Björk and Buddy Ebsen. The story was co-written by Jed Harris, the theatrical producer. The story is set in Berlin during the Allied occupation in the years following World War II. Peck plays a Military Police lieutenant colonel of the United States Army. Plot Cpl. John Leatherby (Ted Avery), an American soldier stationed in West Berlin, is kidnapped after escorting his German girlfriend to her home. The Soviets deny involvement in the kidnapping through their intermediary Col. Lodejinski, who is secretly an American and British intelligence asset. Charles Leatherby, the corporal's father and a Toledo industrialist, attempts to expedite his son's retrieval by leveraging his ties to the Eisenhower administration and prominent senators. The elder Leatherby flies to West Berlin and attempts to bully State Department and military officials into quickly retrieving his son, demanding that they offer the Soviets a monetary bribe. Meanwhile, Lt. Col. Steve Van Dyke (Gregory Peck), the eccentric provost marshal for the American sector, is contacted by his old flame and East German source "Hoffy" Hoffmeir (Anita Björk). Hoffmeir implies that Cpl. Leatherby has been kidnapped by the Soviets or East Germans, who intend to exchange him for two West Berliners, Herr and Frau Schindler. Lacking viable alternatives, Van Dyke allows Hoffmeir to facilitate the trade. After a tense meeting with Leatherby, Van Dyke invites him to dinner at the Katacombe restaurant, ostensibly to discuss the proposed exchange. Instead, Van Dyke attempts to make Leatherby understand the human cost of the trade by revealing the restaurant's piano player and her husband, who was blinded by the Nazis, as the Schindlers. While visibly disturbed by the prospect of sending the elderly couple to their deaths, Leatherby insists that the exchange proceed. Van Dyke has the couple arrested, but they attempt suicide by strychnine poisoning and are transported to an American military hospital. There, the piano player reveals herself as Rachel Cameron (Jill Esmond), an English expatriate and MI6 asset, and her husband as General Gerd von Kratzenow (Anton Farber), an anti-Nazi conspirator who had been jailed and tortured by the Nazi regime.