I hate to rain on the parade of the people here who think this film is so great, but I had to force myself to watch it until the end. It obviously comes from a time in British history when the attitude was "Good show, British boys. You stuck it out in the German POW camps and kept the Jerries busy with your escape attempts, and we're proud of you chaps." That kind of gung-ho, congratulatory feeling is everywhere in the movie. Unfortunately, it turns the story into something bordering on the farcical. The Germans are portrayed as hapless dupes, toothless blusterers, not quite comical but easily fooled and quite incapable of backing up their threats. They may begin by saying that any attempt at escape will be met with death, but none of that seems to ever happen, and when an escape attempt is broken up or an escapee is returned, nobody seems the worse for wear. When two German shepherd dogs jump on an escapee emerging from a tunnel, they don't bite. It's all a game for the prisoners, without any real danger, pretty much on the level of schoolboy pranks. Life in Colditz is cheery, without any privations that we can see. It looks like a better place to be than in training camp back in Britain, where discipline was tough and your day was gruelling.
The prisoners seem to have a very free hand in the castle, moving about almost at will. How did they manage to cut through all those steel bars that they removed so easily from a window? How did they put together several dozen German uniforms, good enough to fool the sentries the escapees walked past? How did they speak such accent-free German that no one noticed? The film claims that everything portrayed is factual, but that claim is difficult to believe.
There is no narrative. The story, such as it is, consists of one escape attempt after another, none of them particularly inventive. Nothing joins them together into a cohesive plot.
I suppose we're expected to forgive crass nationalism in war movies. The Americans always save the day in American films, the British show superior character in British films. For me, this kind of thing spoils a movie. The Colditz story has it in spades. Brits always respond to Germans with a cheekiness that I think in real life would have earned them a rifle butt to the head. And they make arrogant, contemptuous comments about other prisoners, French, Polish, or Belgian. That dissolved most of the sympathy I might have felt for them. Yet, when the credits roll at the end, we see that these others were in fact more successful than the British in their escapes.
I didn't like this movie at all.
