I was lucky to find a DVD of this film. In my memory the film was excellent and seeing it again after 30 years or so I was not disappointed. As an escape film it works beautifully. Someone tries - and in the end succeeds, as the title suggests - to escape from prison camp. What makes this film special is that it is a German who is portrayed as the hero. As a child it was the first time that I ever saw a war movie with a Good German in it (or at the very least not a bad and/or stupid one). Hardy Krüger was of course brilliant and he later did a similar job in Flight of the Phoenix where he played an arrogant but in the end sympathetic German. And the film does not even make the soldier a secret enemy of the Nazi regime. He is portrayed as a loyal German soldier who sees it as his duty to escape and to continue fighting the allies. For me to see that English film makers where able to make a film like this made me very optimistic. They avoid using clichés. And funny enough, they confirm the cliché about the English, namely that they are fair and good sportsmen, because that's what we have here. A game where the object is to escape from prison. A German wins and this is what we see. Thank you.
Review of The One That Got Away
