Review of The One That Got Away (1957) by Orlok W — 29 Oct 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!
This review of The One That Got Away (1957) was written by Orlok W on 29 Oct 2009.
The One That Got Away has generally received positive reviews.
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