I was mightily impressed by Christian Bale’s bravura performance as a World War II P.O.W. escapee in Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn (2007), but Hardy Krüger’s performance in a nearly identical role in The One That Got Away, also as an actual person, is more powerful still. Krüger plays Oberleutnant Franz von Werra, the only Second World War German prisoner who escaped from British capture to return to Germany, we are immediately informed, to make the British seem less stupid and lackadaisical than they do throughout this British film. In any case, we root for the proud young German officer every step of the way. We wish the pilot well with every drop of blood pumping from our electrified heart.
It helps that von Werra isn’t a Nazi ideologue. It helps that the war is over and the Allied side won. But what helps most of all are two things: Krüger’s irresistible humanity and charm; our own humanity. Let me tell you that when this boy convincingly loses his cockiness I was sent into a tailspin of tears. “Are you dead?” von Werra is asked when, face down in mud, he is captured after one of his serial attempts at freedom. “Very nearly,” Franz von Werra replies.
His most irrepressible moment finds von Werra gleefully jumping up and down to test how frozen a lake is that he hopes to walk across to get to a neutral country: the United States.
Roy Ward Baker’s direction is excellent—well relaxed or rigorous as steel, where either is necessary; and von Werra’s getting across that vast lake at night finds Baker achieving haunting, poetic, nearly otherworldly images of ordeal, determination and destiny.
An updating postscript seamlessly and poignantly slips the film into antiwar territory.
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Dennis Grunes 