Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Bereamic Awesome Movie

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.

Robert J. Maxwell It begins in a leisurely way, with British POWs in a camp, chatting and grumbling and being a little impudent with the German guards. On the whole it fits into the often splendid genre of post-war British films.The POWs are more bored than abused. The sleeping quarters each house about four men. They sleep on comfortable bunks and wear pajamas. There's even a piano somewhere playing Mozart. In the hospital there are Beethoven records. But, driven by a desire to spend money, find a girl, and get a good meal, they begin to build a tunnel out of the camp.The hut nearest the wire is too far away to use as a base, so the men construct a wooden horse to use on the fields outside; that is, a vaulting platform with a padded top, the sort of thing many of us had to cope with in high school gym class. Each day, when the men are not busy peeling potatoes, one of them will be hidden inside the hollow box-like structure and work on the tunnel, disguising the entrance with dirt-covered sandbags. During the practice runs, most of the POWs leap the horse easily but one continues to lose his nerve at the last minute and smash belly first into the structure. He's demoted to cheerleader.The German guards are not the raving maniacs of the war years. Most are reasonable and, as in real life, a bit old for combat and worn out. This doesn't stop one of the Unteroffiziers from examining the vaulting horse in private and, after looking around to make sure no one is watching, he leaps across the top lengthwise, outdoing all the Brits, and grins with silent pride.The work proceeds and there are moments of tension, as there must be in any movie about men crawling fifty feet through a tiny tunnel of dirt. No power on earth could get me to do it.As it turns out, two men, Leo Genn and Anthony Steele, escape to the forest, thence to Lübeck, an ancient and distinctive northern city that gave us Günther Grass and Thomas Mann. Some location shooting was obviously done around the city's landmarks. The pace picks up. Narrow escapes up alleys and over fences. Evil forces are closing in on them but they finally make their way to a Danish freighter where they are welcomed aboard. Danish freighters can be fun. I accompanied two linguists aboard a freighter this size in Nova Scotia. The object was to see how the pronunciation of a sentence in French would be altered by a Danish accent. "Selon notre dernier rapport la besoin est très bon." I don't know about the business but the festivities were gay and we staggered off loaded on Akvavit. (I just threw that in for lagniappe.) Copenhagen, of course, was occupied by the Germans in World War II and conditions remained dicey for the pair. The first violent scene takes place in the boatyard of a nearby fishing village when Genn kills a German guard, an act that leaves him chagrined.The escape are close but Genn and Steele finally make it to Sweden, which, unlike neighboring Norway, remained neutral for reasons having to do with the transport of raw materials. Safe at last in the arms of the British embassy.The opening scenes, the tunnels and so forth, have now become familiar fare in these escape movies, but the twists and turns of their escape through Germany and Denmark are engaging enough. I admire the photography too, and the treatment of the enemy, who are rendered as human instead of as cartoon figures.

Laakbaar This is an old but still-watchable POW escape movie. Stalag Luft III was the POW camp where the Great Escape took place. Before that, however, there had been a more small-scale escape of three men in tunnels built with the assistance of a vaulting horse. This well-made movie tells the story of that overshadowed 1943 adventure, which involved a small number of British and Commonwealth officers going to extraordinary lengths to deceive their guards and the three escapees making their way through Germany to freedom.Made just seven years after the event, and only five years after the end of the war, this British movie has an immediacy, accuracy and realism that seem remarkable now. (We now see the Nazis as murderous monsters, but in this movie the officers sing "Deutschland is kaput" in the showers to taunt their guards.) The culture of that period, the camaraderie and the sense of quiet determination shine through in the film, probably because many of the actors were of that generation and had served themselves. Almost all of them went on to have long acting careers.This was a stalwart generation that had committed to total war. Afterwards a flood of movies (still continuing today) has sought to process this cataclysm. This is an early example of that genre. The feeling is still not that "we were heroes", but that "we survived" and "we did amazing things". Made during the bleak period that followed the war in the UK, this is a matter-of-fact kind of film that avoids flashiness, sensationalism, cliché and even stereotype -- so some modern viewers may find the movie a little slow.

bkoganbing Upon seeing a film entitled The Wooden Horse, one including myself might think it was about some fake object like the famous Trojan wooden horse that was used to smuggle in people or objects like weapons. The horse we're talking about in this film is the kind used in every gymnasium in the world.But this one aids indirectly in the smuggling out of prisoners from a German POW camp called Stalag 3. It's quite simple, it's too long a dig from the prisoner barracks to outside the camp for a tunnel. So the horse is placed over a midway point and diggers are smuggled in and out. It also serves as a place where fresh air can come into the men working in the tunnel. It's quite an ingenious scheme and Leo Genn, Anthony Steel, and David Tomlinson are the three that escape. The rest of the film plays a lot like The Great Escape as the three escaped prisoners try to make it to the neutral country of Sweden.Though The Wooden Horse doesn't have the budget that The Great Escape did it tells its story in a fast moving and compact fashion with no frills. Location shooting in Denmark and Germany make it quite authentic. The British occupation zone was in the northern part of the new Federal Republic of Germany and many extras were hired among the locals. And the film holds up well after sixty years.I'll bet Kurt Thomas never thought of a gym horse being used this way.

MARIO GAUCI Excellent P.O.W. adventure, adapted by Eric Williams from his own book (a paperback copy of which forms part of my father's library) that was inspired by true events; it may well be the first film of its kind and, therefore, has a lot to answer for – not just similarly stiff-upper-lipped examples such as ALBERT, R.N. (1953; which I'll be watching presently), THE COLDITZ STORY (1955) and DANGER WITHIN (1959) but higher-profile releases from the other side of the Atlantic, namely STALAG 17 (1953) and THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963). This, then, sets the basis pretty solidly: British soldiers interned in a German camp devise an ingenious plan of escape, borrowing a page from Greek legend – burrowing from under a vaulting horse used during physical exercise and in full view of their captors! Actually, the film is neatly split into two halves: the first deals with the slow process of digging the tunnel, culminating in the escape itself, while the latter stages depict their fortunes outside the camp as they try to make it to neutral Sweden. Typically of these British films, the cast showcases several established (Leo Genn), current (Anthony Steel) and up-and-coming (Peter Finch, David Tomlinson and Bill Travers) stars, to say nothing of innumerable reliable character actors (Anthony Dawson, Bryan Forbes, Michael Goodliffe and Walter Gotell). The three leads/escapees are Genn, Steel and Tomlinson: while the first two stick together, the latter goes his own way – only to run into the others on reaching safety. As can be expected, the narrative involves plenty of suspense and excitement; as with most male-centered P.O.W. sagas, too, female interest is kept to the barest minimum. Director Lee didn't have a lengthy career – with this and the somewhat similar (albeit with a change of both setting and viewpoint) A TOWN LIKE ALICE (1956) his most noteworthy achievements – but he certainly milked every gripping situation in this case (even if, reportedly, delays in filming saw Lee quitting his post prematurely…leaving producer Ian Dalrymple with the task of tying up loose ends!). Anyway, worth special mention is the exquisite lighting (particularly during night-time sequences) throughout.