ianlouisiana Review of Breakout

Breakout (1959)

"Tales of mens' shirts - a story of Down Under". Spike Milligan

[6/10 · 18 January 2012]

"The prison camp was full of British officers who had sworn to die - rather than be captured".So the late - lamented Mr Milligan gently guyed the British P.O.W. film genre which by 1959 was beginning to run out of steam.Let's face it,blokes digging tunnels,comic opera "funny" or sadistic guards,walking around with trousers filled with dirt from the tunnel and doing endless calisthenics in flapping gym shorts can only have a limited appeal to even uncritical English audiences. However,adding the rather louche Mr M.Wilding and nice but dim Mr P.Jones as a kind of chorus was a nice touch by Bryan Forbes in "Danger within" which is otherwise merely competent with all concerned acting within their comfort zones. I am a great admirer of Mr B.Forbes as an actor,writer and director but I don't feel he was pushing the envelope here in any other department. I once worked with a former R.A.F. aircrew who,a week after being gazetted with his DFC was shot down over the Ruhr and spent three years as a guest of our European partners.He told me 90% of the P.O.Ws simply wanted to do their time as peacefully and painlessly as possible and get home in one piece. Those that planned escapes were avoided like Ronnie Stephens the sewer rat in "Danger within",albeit for different reasons. As former officers typed away at their memoirs,that aspect of their imprisonment seems to have somehow been downgraded.