THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY
A film review by Shane R. Burridge
Copyright 1996 Shane R. Burridge
(1957) 111m.
It was sporting of Rank studios to film this true story, which shows Germans in a sympathetic - even heroic - light, only a dozen years after WWII had ended. It also makes for an interesting exercise in the power of cinema. Despite bitter postwar feelings it must have been hard for Allied audiences not to root for the `enemy' POW trying to escape back to his homeland. And how many British films of that time would have gambled with a German actor as its leading man? As it happened, this was a star turn for Hardy Kruger, who gives a charismatic performance as Lt Franz von Werra, a Luftwaffe pilot forced down over Kent and then shipped to a POW camp in the Lake District. His tenacious escape attempts throughout the remainder of the film make for compelling viewing. He tries so hard that you'll really want him to succeed, especially by the end (in a sequence I find quite surreal) when he is half-frozen and can't seem to manage another step.
Picture succeeds because of two reasons: the humanization of individual struggle negates the political ordinance of war; and regardless of race, color, or creed, we always like to see someone beat the odds. For those of us who have seen many an escape story featuring Allied heroes it comes as a breath of fresh air to see a story told from the other side. Film also shows us the reason for the lack of such stories - how exactly do you escape from an island nation? But Werra has several plans. His initial breakout is absurdly simple - he runs when the guards' backs are turned - but his efforts to remain free become increasingly audacious: he may be fulfilling a desire or responsibility to live up to his flamboyant (but largely fabricated) public image. Film stays on its toes the whole time. I especially enjoy the way civilians are obliging, a little bemused, and polite whenever they encounter Kruger's character - I wonder if director Roy Ward Baker took some perverse pleasure in showing easygoing Britishers being duped by Werra's confident fast-talking and dashes for freedom. This is the one subgenre of war movies that makes it okay for us to view the antics of the characters as if they were schoolboys larking about and dodging the headmaster: the one type that doesn't demand we concentrate on the tragic elements of war. It acts, of course, as `escapism'. Werra's escape is indeed epic in scale - in reality he traveled nearly half a planet to make his way home (the film stops about halfway through). The fascinating footnote contains enough material for another whole story.
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