When a sub-genre is established in the wonderfully diverse cosmology of film, you can bet that someone in this post-modern, media savvy world will add to it. Only they'll have knowing winks to the audience when the usual hoops are jumped through or they'll play with those expectations and pull the rug out from under you by subverting them and twisting the plot. We all know the score, they know we know, we know they know we know ad infinitum, or more often, nauseam. It comes as a surprise to me that someone was at this in 1970 with a humble POW movie.
The inmates are tunnelling out. Dummies in for escapees at roll call, check. Uniforms manufactured in camp, check. Tunnel cave-in during the escape, check. It's not all by the numbers though. We have a vaulting horse. No tunnel mouth there though as you can see right under it. Good topsoil on the turnip patch, but that's not where they're hiding the spoil. That this is a British POW camp the those escaping are German prisoners is unusual and welcome. Maybe the biggest twist of all is that the whole escape has been rumbled by the authorities, but they let them escape in order to net a bigger prize.
OK, it's not as knowing as anything since 1994, but it does play with the genre well, albeit a little ham-fistedly at time. Underneath the genre trappings there's a good little drama with a central duel between an Irish Captain in British Intelligence and the U-Boat Commander commanding officer in camp. Both are willing to bend and break the rules in pursuit of their aims. One of them will even kill to achieve his aims. Both are highly flawed individuals. Both are self-centred and neither of them succeed. From a simple set up at the start, the film reaches a fresh and unexpected conclusion to give a true stand-out film.
There are some clumsy cuts and overlays to demonstrate simultaneous actions in various locations as the escape progresses that really don't work and the drive of the second half of the film falls flat. The feuds within the camp, both that between captors and captives and between the Luftwaffe and the Submariners, are edgy. The tension created evaporates as soon as the escapees are out of the camp. It all gets a little clunky. However, overall this is a good film and definitely one to watch if you like your post-modernism freshly minted from the 70s.
The inmates are tunnelling out. Dummies in for escapees at roll call, check. Uniforms manufactured in camp, check. Tunnel cave-in during the escape, check. It's not all by the numbers though. We have a vaulting horse. No tunnel mouth there though as you can see right under it. Good topsoil on the turnip patch, but that's not where they're hiding the spoil. That this is a British POW camp the those escaping are German prisoners is unusual and welcome. Maybe the biggest twist of all is that the whole escape has been rumbled by the authorities, but they let them escape in order to net a bigger prize.
OK, it's not as knowing as anything since 1994, but it does play with the genre well, albeit a little ham-fistedly at time. Underneath the genre trappings there's a good little drama with a central duel between an Irish Captain in British Intelligence and the U-Boat Commander commanding officer in camp. Both are willing to bend and break the rules in pursuit of their aims. One of them will even kill to achieve his aims. Both are highly flawed individuals. Both are self-centred and neither of them succeed. From a simple set up at the start, the film reaches a fresh and unexpected conclusion to give a true stand-out film.
There are some clumsy cuts and overlays to demonstrate simultaneous actions in various locations as the escape progresses that really don't work and the drive of the second half of the film falls flat. The feuds within the camp, both that between captors and captives and between the Luftwaffe and the Submariners, are edgy. The tension created evaporates as soon as the escapees are out of the camp. It all gets a little clunky. However, overall this is a good film and definitely one to watch if you like your post-modernism freshly minted from the 70s.