Steinesongo Too many fans seem to be blown away

Libramedi Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

YouHeart I gave it a 7.5 out of 10

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

John Seal A thoroughly entertaining (and true!) feature about a World War II German prisoner-of-war with a knack for escaping his British captors, The One That Got Away stars Hardy Kruger as Franz von Werra, a Luftwaffe officer shot down during the Battle of Britain. Unwilling to spend the next few years peeling potatoes or cracking rocks, von Werra immediately began plotting his return to Germany, and after a few misfires miraculously pulled off the feat after taking a detour to a remote POW camp in Canada. The film defies convention by actually allowing the Bad Guy to outfox the Good Guys and contrasts neatly with more traditional tales of Stalag-bound heroism such as The Colditz Story (1955) and even The Great Escape (1963). It also offered Kruger the opportunity to deliver the performance of a lifetime, highlighted by the final St. Lawrence Seaway sequence in which he brings a lumbering, Frankenstein's Monster demeanour to his character. Additionally, the film benefits immensely from tremendous location footage shot during the dead of winter, as well as the very wise decision to almost entirely fore go incidental music, which lends the film additional realism and allows the viewer to concentrate on the action at hand without being manipulated by the score. Quite simply, this is an excellent film that will stick with you.

Terrell-4 This is one of the better WWII movies about an escape from a prisoner-of-war camp. The story is taut and suspenseful. The odds against success are high but we wind up rooting for the man anyway. The guy is handsome, competent, resourceful and self-confident to the point of smugness. No, the guy isn't played by Steve McQueen. There is no ball-bouncing in a prison cell. The man is Oberleutnant Franz von Werra, played by the German actor Hardy Kruger. Von Werra's Messerschmitt is shot down over England on September 5, 1940. He is captured, interrogated and sent to a prisoner of war camp for officers. He turned out to be the only German captured on British soil who ever escaped and made it back to Germany. Von Werra turns out to be a committed German officer, determined to escape, and with enough drive, ingenuity and luck to escape from British camps three times. The first time sees him staggering for five days through mud and freezing rain to try to reach a British port and a neutral ship. When he's finally recaptured he's half dead. The British send him to a much tougher camp in the north. This time he organizes a tunnel dig, figures out how to make fake identity discs and how to convert rag-tag clothing into something passably civilian. On this break von Werra manages to talk himself onto a RAF base posing as a Dutch pilot. He's captured while seated in the cockpit of a Hurricane trying to get it started. He planned to fly back to Germany. Now the British ship him off to a prisoner-of-war camp in Canada. They figure that'll take the starch out of his determination to return to Germany. They didn't figure that von Werra would realize the significance of the United States being a neutral country and how close the train taking him to the camp would be to the Saint Lawrence River border. Sure enough, in the dead cold of a Canadian winter (January, 1941), he escapes from the train, works his way through the snow and freezing drizzle to the mostly frozen river. He finds a boat and finally is picked up on the American side. Our movie ends here, with a big smile on von Werra's frozen face and mumbled "thank yous" to the American border guard who found him. Through all of this the escapes are carefully shown with a lot of dramatic tension. You can't help but wind up hoping von Werra's persistence will pay off. Knowing he's an enthusiastic German pilot, a fighter ace, who is eager to get back to the battles takes a little of the edge off, but still... The One That Got Away is filmed in black and white. There are no sweeping, beautiful shots of the countryside. We're talking late fall and winter in Britain and Canada. It's cold and grey. If it's not snowing, it's raining. If it's not raining, it's drizzling. If it's not drizzling it's still so cold you'll want a fire going during the day. The acting is as cool and competent as the movie. And what about von Werra after he made it to America? The Canadians tried to get him back. The Americans wanted to send him back. While everyone was arguing his status, von Werra slipped across the U. S. border into Mexico, then made his way back to Germany by way of Peru, Bolivia, Brazil and Spain. He arrived in Berlin on April 18, 1941. He was assigned to fly on the Eastern front, became an ace again, then was sent with his unit to the Netherlands for rest and refitting. On October 21, 1941, his plane malfunctioned during a training flight and went down in the sea. His body was never recovered. Franz von Werra's luck had finally run out.

Oct After the Cold War broke out, it was necessary to reconcile the newly democratic, Nazi-free West Germany to its former enemies. Hollywood did its bit with a sympathetic account of Erwin Rommel in "The Desert Fox". After "Frieda", the British movie business followed a spate of PoW escape films with one about a Luftwaffe pilot who had been as hard to hold as the heroes of "Albert RN" and "The Wooden Horse".Early in the Second World War most Germans captured while bombing Britain did not try to escape: they thought the Wehrmacht would soon arrive to free them. "Baron" Franz von Werra was an exception. No Nazi, he was a Swiss boy who had been brought up by aristocratic German relations and felt he owed his adopted country his services; he was also a show-off who idolised von Richthofen and relished the glamour of being a flying ace.Roy Baker (thus billed on screen) said he wished to get away from "beer-swilling krauts or homosexual Prussians". He saw von Werra as a maverick, and shot him moving from right to left across the screen whenever possible because typically film characters move in the other direction.The film is pretty faithful to his story, as was established years later by a documentary called "Von Werra" (Werner Schweizer, 2002) which his impersonator, Hardy Kruger, presented. Kruger's own past was more Nazi than Franz's: he was at Sonthofen, the Party's "order castle" school for the future elite, and his blond good looks are said to have been admired by Dr Goebbels, fuhrer of the German film business.Pitted against a string of barely differentiated British officer-class character actors, Kruger has a whale of a time in what is virtually a one-man show. It lets him display charm, cunning and endurance in buckets. First he outwits his interrogators, then he twice goes on the run in England (the second time almost taking off in a stolen Hurricane) and finally he flees from a Canadian train in below-zero temperatures. He zigzags 30 miles to the St Lawrence River and paddles through floes in pitch darkness into the neutral USA, arriving with badly frostbitten ears.Concentrating on his time in captivity, the script neither pleads for sympathy for an enemy nor arraigns him, It does not give us any background on the man, and his second epic escape-- from the US extradition authorities, via Central and South America, the Atlantic and Italy back to the Reich-- is not covered either. True to his gentlemanly self-image, von Werra used his brief fame to compare conditions for the British in German camps unfavourably with those he had experienced-- even the primitive Grizedale Hall-- and got them improved. (The Canadian camp he avoided was luxurious.) He flew on the Eastern Front in the early days of 'Barbarossa', downing obsolete Soviet aircraft, but disappeared on a routine flight later in 1941.Baker would soon make 'A Night to Remember', the film all true 'Titanic' buffs prefer to James Cameron's version. Here too the virtues of understatement are evident-- crisp monochrome photography, short scenes which always drive the story on, thrifty but credible art direction. Von Werra's ordeals in the rain-soaked Lake District and the icy Canada/USA border are gruelling, and the doughtiest British spectator will not begrudge him his cheeky postcard after completing his home run. Baker used a documentary cameraman, Eric Cross, and shot the St Lawrence scenes in Sweden.

MARIO GAUCI This is one of several classic British war films made during the 1950s, but which I never had the opportunity to watch before: in retrospect, it has survived better than some of the others because the central character is not English and, therefore, such stiff-upper-lip sentiments are kept largely at bay throughout; the fact that he's actually a German who's portrayed as a resourceful - even charming - scoundrel rather than the stereotypical Nazi villain, makes the film all the more interesting when viewed today! It details the exciting true-life escape story of ace pilot Franz von Werra (an ideally cast Hardy Kruger in his first international role) from several British prison camps in 1940; ironically, he was lost at sea not long after having reached Germany and resumed his war duty! The plot is basically split into three sections: the first establishes von Werra's defiance of authority and his resolve to break free from confinement - culminating with his initial escape attempt; transferred to a new camp, we immediately see him at work on building a tunnel - this time, he's part of a mass breakout and, by impersonating a Dutch flyer, almost manages to take off with a plane belonging to the R.A.F.!; finally, he leaps off a train transporting him to a Canadian prison and, bravely enduring the freezing weather, makes it across the border by boat into the still neutral U.S.A.Absorbing and suspenseful, this is an excellent example of its type and period, with all the care that professional handling could bestow; above all, the quality of Eric Cross's black-and-white cinematography is most evident during the scenes of hardship in von Werra's various getaways. While this is Hardy Kruger's show all the way, the supporting cast highlights numerous minor staples of British cinema from this era, namely Michael Goodliffe, Alec McCowen, Terence Alexander and John Van Eyssen.Ultimately, the best compliment I can pay to the film is perhaps that it makes for a worthy companion piece to Robert Bresson's inspirational A MAN ESCAPED (1956; one of the greatest of all films) and Andrew L. Stone's very funny THE PASSWORD IS COURAGE (1962) - both also dealing with the story of true-life P.O.W. escapees - although THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY is, in hindsight, neither as introspectively solemn as the former nor as gently humorous as the latter. In any case, I've watched and thoroughly enjoyed a good many contemporaneous British war films (THE CRUEL SEA [1953], THE COLDITZ STORY [1954], THE DAM BUSTERS [1954] and ICE COLD IN ALEX [1958], to name but a few); there are, however, quite a few more I need to catch up with - THE WOODEN HORSE (1950), ALBERT R.N. (1953), DUNKIRK (1958), I WAS MONTY'S DOUBLE (1958), DANGER WITHIN (1959), etc.