POW movies had been a sure thing at the British box office in the 1950s, but the shine was starting to come off in the 1960s (though there was still some life in the genre, e.g. The Great Escape, King Rat, Hogan's Heroes). This is based on the true adventures of Charles Coward, a British soldier who was captured in 1940 and spent a fair bit of the subsequent years escaping and/or trying to make trouble for the Germans.
In common with many of these films, being a POW is a bit of a jolly jape - they try to get away with as much as you can from teacher, and occasionally cop a caning; there are stage shows, hi-jinks and escape attempts; the Germans are mostly silly idiots who can easily be outwitted. I'm sure this did happen every now and then but it feels vaguely offensive.
The lead role really requires a jaunty, British Jimmy Cagney type - maybe a comic. Dirk Bogarde isn't really idea but he's better than Jack Hawkins, Anthony Steel, Stanley Baker, John Mills, Alec Guiness, etc. would have been. Actually maybe that's not right - Mills and Guiness could play convincing cockneys. Nonetheless Bogarde puts on a lower class accent and doesn't do too badly - he really throws himself into it. This was a number of old style British movies Bogarde made in the 60s where he kept one hand on the types of films that made him a star (e.g. Doctor in Distress, The High Bright Sun) while also doing artier stuff with Losey and Visconti. It feels a couple of years too late.
I admit to being in a mixed mind about this film - I kept changing my mind about it as I watched it. Just as I was about to write it off it would come back with an interesting scene or bit of business. But overall it didn't quite work.
The film feels as though it struggles to get a fix on a story: Coward keeps escaping and getting captured again, some of which was is interesting (I loved all the detail of the things they do) but it like happens three times.
There is a big central escape sequence, which feels very familiar to that in The Great Escape (there's lots of tunnelling and the tunnels come out short of the forest and all the prisoners are captured and put on a train together).
There is a woman's part which is not convincingly shoe-horned into the action - I didn't mind her at first when she's with the resistance, but for her to appear towards the end when he had escaped felt silly. Coward's adventures near Auschwitz (he helped save several Jews) are mentioned in a throw away line towards the end of the movie - they're too scared to even say the word "Auschwitz". (Apparently a sequence was filmed but cut).
Aussies will be interested in the presence of Ed Devereaux as a scowling Aussie soldier. Alfred Lynch plays Coward's best friend, a very large part.
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