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.

John Leatherby (Ted Avery), an American soldier stationed in West Berlin, is kidnapped after escorting his German girlfriend to her home.

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).

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.

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.

Cameron reveals that she and her husband, now living under the name Schindler, are being pursued not by the Soviets themselves but by ex-Nazi agents responsible for von Kratzenow's torture, who now serve the Eastern Bloc.

Van Dyke suspects that Hoffmeir is responsible for exposing Lodejinski as an American asset, but allows her to proceed with arrangements for the agreed-upon exchange.

By claiming to Hoffmeir that von Kratzenow succumbed to the strychnine, Van Dyke sets the stage for a one-to-one trade of Cpl.

American military police force the ambulance to return to East Berlin before its escort can confirm the patient's identity.

[5] In July 1953, The New York Times reported that the title was changed to Night People to avoid audiences anticipating "an African adventure."

One biographer reported that Peck became so angry over one dispute that he channeled his anger into a scene in which his character rebukes Broderick Crawford's, and filmed ten pages of script in two hours.

[11] When released, Variety described it as "a top-notch, exciting cloak-and-dagger thriller" with the director getting "a clean triple for his smart handling of production, direction and scripting.

In October 2012, it was released on Region 1 DVD as part of the Twentieth Century Fox Cinema Archives collection, however it is cropped at 1.33:1, which means the viewer sees half the picture, and the quality of the screen image is very grainy due to the magnification of the film in order to get the "fullscreen" effect.