27 Jan The One That Got Away
The One That Got Away, 1957 WWII movie
(1957) British movie about the exploits of German fighter pilot Franz von Werra. In 1940, he was shot down over England, captured and from that moment on he is able to execute one amazing escape after another.
I nearly gave up on this movie because I couldn’t understand the dialogue. Turner Classic Movies usually provides closed captioning but on this movie they did not. I guess they couldn’t understand what was being said either. In the 2nd half of the movie you can’t wait to see what happens next and, for the most part, there is little dialogue.
I was fascinated by this young man (he was about 26 at the time) who was able to talk himself out of most any situation. He would have been an excellent OSS agent.
It is a true story, of course, based on a book of the same name. Once Franz reached the US, after escaping from a train headed for a POW camp in Canada. he demanded protection from a neutral country, which we were at the time. He was taken to New York City, and on Wikipedia I found a link to this clipping about his sightseeing there. A representative from the German embassy helped von Werra escape over the border into Mexico. From there he went through Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, and Spain to Berlin and rejoined the Luftwaffe!
On the 18th of April 1941, on a patrol over the North Sea, his plane disappeared, and he was never heard from again.
Here is what I kept thinking. It’s a good thing he was a German escaping from the Allies. Had it been the other way around he would have been shot immediately.
The One That Got Away on amazon.com
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