And challenge the great Houdini to a remarkable escape

I have wanted to see The One That Got Away (1957) ever since I discovered Hardy Krüger in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) in 2005. I am pleased to report that it was worth the wait. If nothing else, its subject is a singular one: the true story of Oberleutnant Franz von Werra, the only German POW to successfully escape from Allied custody in World War II. But it's a neat movie, too, a tight chase story with an unconventional hero. I was going to compare it to Valkyrie (2008) or 49th Parallel (1941), but it's really not like either one of them. In the former, the protagonists' determination to kill Hitler guarantees that the audience will find them sympathetic despite their varying political affiliations; in the latter, the Nazis may be the main characters, but they are markedly not the heroes. The One That Got Away is firmly on the side of Franz von Werra, as The Colditz Story (1955) and later The Great Escape (1963) are on the side of their officers and gentlemen, and the audience can deal with the cognitive dissonance on its own time. The script doesn't sentimentalize him. Von Werra may not be a card-carrying Nazi, but he's an unapologetic soldier of the Third Reich, a cocky rock-star of a fighter pilot whose exploits have gotten his voice on national broadcast and his face on the cover of Hör mit mir and who is not above embellishing his kill record for the press; he's a fire-eater and needs to be known for it, and it is quite possible that he bets his interrogating officer a bottle of brandy against a package of cigarettes that he'll be back safe in Germany inside six months not so much because he misses his Vaterland as because no one has ever done it before and damned if Freiherr von Werra won't be the first. With his blond hair and black flying leathers, he could almost model for a portrait of the Übermensch (or the definition of chutzpah). But he's also quick, resourceful, undeterred, and not without a sense of humor, all of which may explain why J. Arthur Rank was willing, barely a dozen years after the end of the war, to fund a picture in which a handsome young German confounds all kinds of British authority from stationmasters to squadron leaders and gets away with it. (There is one figure he can't cheat, and that's death: as the end titles inform us, Franz von Werra was lost over the North Sea only seven months after his return to Germany. But even then, his body was never found; it is as though he escaped a second and final time, somewhere neither newspapers nor the Ritterkreuz could follow.) I think I am making it sound as though the only reason to see The One That Got Away is the novelty of a prisoner-of-war movie from the other side. See it for the generous arrogance of Hardy Krüger's grin, for the cool conversational knifework of Michael Goodliffe's RAF interrogator, for the suspense derived from a kestrel's cry or the eating of an apple or the final half-hour that is almost a silent film, trudging expressionistically across the frozen St. Lawrence River that made me think of the Gobrin Ice. It's a salute to an honorable enemy—or it's simply a good story—and I'm still not sure what else is like it. But it's out on DVD now, so you can decide for yourself. I cooked a duck and two desserts today and I'm going to bed.