The One That Got Away

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walter m @Harlequin68 04/15/2015 "The One that Got Away" starts with Oberleutnant Franz Von Werra(Hardy Kruger) crash landing his airplane in England. When he sees the man with the meat cleaver running towards him, he knows the gig is up and surrenders promptly. But he has no intention of sticking around long for the polite English interrogation, promptly requesting a move to a prison camp. That's before he makes a bet with an English commanding officer that he will successfully escape. You can have your gaudy special effects. I'll take some good old fashioned exciting filmmaking like which is featured in "The One that Got Away," directed as well as it is by Roy Ward Baker, even if it does start a little slow.(Great title, too.) For my money's worth, Von Werra making a break for it is the most breathtaking sequence I have seen in a good long time. While there are hints to his backstory, this is also detailed in life on the homefront of England during World War II where men do not listen to women at their own peril.(Short of the current television series "Manhattan," this is also one of the few post-war entertainments that connects the World Wars.) As far as Von Werra who survived on pure bravado goes, this was actually only part of his journey, as the endnote puts it with no shortage of irony. See more 04/06/2013 Solid gold chase movie - where you cheer for a Nazi pilot--Giving the enemy his due!! See more 07/18/2012 very underated movie this is a great action thriller a must see See more 10/29/2009 THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY is an exciting WWII film that is based on Kendal Burt's book detailing the real life exploits of Swiss born Franz von Werra, a German pilot who is captured by the British when his plane crashes. Von Werra is played with a muted but still smug swagger by Hardy Kruger,a favorite of mine since SUNDAYS AND CYBELE (LES DIMANCHES DE VILLES D'AVRAY) which won the Oscar for Best Foreign film in 1962. The pilot's sole goal is to be assigned to a POW camp so he can go about the business of escaping, the Brits are more concerned with trying to pry information out of him--even going so far as to suggest that his well-known heroics might be all so much fakery. No go. Finally they give and he's sent to a camp from which he quickly attempts an escape but is just as quickly captured and shipped off to another camp. At the second camp the escape is more organized a la THE GREAT ESCAPE but with much the same results for von Werra. And so it goes until he is shipped off to Canada with other escape prone Germans, where he makes his final bid for freedom. The fact that this film was made so soon after the end of WWII and yet Kruger can still makes us feel so much empathy for his character and genuinely make us hope for him to succeed is a testament to both Kruger as an actor as well as the writers and the director Roy Ward Baker. Don't forget to read the epilogue and find out what happened to von Werra after he left Canada! See more 08/19/2009 hardy kruger comes close to matching the personality of the original Von Werra...for being supposedly the only Axis POW to escape successfully Von Werra's feats equal 10 successful attempts by allied POW's... See more 08/12/2009 Saw this many years ago as a teen/young adult. I enjoyed it then and enjoyed seeing the end of it again this afternoon.. See more Read all reviews

The One That Got Away

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