4 days ago
The 10 best prisoner-of-war dramas, from Stalag 17 to Colditz
Being a prisoner of war is a fate no one could wish for and films and TV dramas won't let us forget that. Whether in the bleak chilliness of central Europe or the steaming jungles of Burma, the plight of the PoW on-screen is one of torture and sadism at the hands of their military captors. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, showing on BBC1/iPlayer and based on Richard Flanagan's searing novel, is just the latest example.
But there's often light in the dark — gallows humour and no shortage of British pluck — as this list below shows.
10. Escape to Victory (1981)
It still sounds absurd: Sylvester Stallone in goal, Michael Caine at left back, Bobby Moore at centre half, Pele up front, all taking on a Nazi team. But come on, this bank holiday matinee favourite is highly enjoyable. The plot isn't so far-fetched either, being inspired by a real story: the 'death match' between the Ukrainian team and a Nazi German side in 1942 in occupied Kyiv. The Ukrainians won 5-3. Rent
Tenko
9. Tenko (1981-84)
The travails of the malnourished women internees as they were roasted in an Asian internment camp after the fall of Singapore in 1942 were popular in the 1980s (about 15 million viewers). It wasn't so much the sight of boils, scorpion bites and torturous labour that kept us glued to it, more the intimate interplay between the women. U
8. Colditz (1972-74)
The 1955 film The Colditz Story was the fourth most popular at the British box office that year. Yet it was in the early 1970s that escape from Colditz-mania really took off thanks to the TV series starring David McCallum, Robert Wagner and Edward Hardwicke. Most affecting is Michael Bryant as Wing Commander George Marsh, who feigns madness to get repatriated. It works, except it leads to a genuine psychosis and he is committed to a mental hospital. DVD
7. Empire of the Sun (1987)
Christian Bale was impressive on screen even at the age of 13. In Steven Spielberg's take on JG Ballard's semi-fictional memoir — about his boyhood internment during the Japanese invasion of China — some of the best moments come when Bale's expat finds himself bonding with John Malkovich's brash American Basie in the camp (and look out for a young Ben Stiller). It's worth revisiting. Bale would later turn PoW again in Werner Herzog's 2006 jungle-survival film Rescue Dawn, also pretty good. Rent
6. Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983)
A cult classic more for its musical connections — a blond David Bowie on the poster and Ryuichi Sakamoto's celebrated synth soundtrack. Yet there's still much curiosity in a tale of Bowie's eccentric English free spirit defying the strict, code-bound cruelties of Captain Yonoi (Sakamoto). An oddity, but Akira Kurosawa and Christopher Nolan put this among their favourite films, so who am I to argue? Rent
5. The Deer Hunter (1978)
Michael Cimino's portrait of a Pennsylvania community wrecked by a war far away slowly builds a sense of dread before exploding into its famed central sequence in Vietnam. No matter how many times you see it, when Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage's characters — taken captive by the Viet Cong — are forced to play Russian roulette, your heart is in your mouth. StudioCanal
Comedy leavens the suffering in Stalag 17
ALAMY
4. Stalag 17 (1953)
The original Second World War PoW film set the template for others, but it still has a feel of its own. The director Billy Wilder's sharp eye for comedy means there's a knockabout fun to the scenes inside Barrack Four as the American prisoners try to keep up morale — 'I'll get you a date with Betty Grable!' Even the camp commandant is played by Otto Preminger as a twinkly-eyed buffoon. There is grit undercutting the humour, of course. Rent
3. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Long before The Narrow Road to the Deep North depicted Burma's Death Railway we had Alec Guinness's stiff-upper-lipped English colonel leading a battalion of British PoWs as they toil away at a bridge. His stubborn national pride in the face of gruelling sadism means the Brits build a better bridge than their captors could. The face-offs between Guinness's Colonel Nicholson and his nemesis Colonel Saito, played by Sessue Hayakawa, are what endure. Sky/Now
2. La Grande Illusion (1937)
Jean Renoir's classic is like a Great Escape from a more civilised age. Erich von Stroheim is unforgettable as the stiff-backed German aristocrat who treats his imprisoned French counterpart Captain De Boieldieu with gentlemanly respect. There's a great clip on YouTube of Orson Welles telling Dick Cavett that this film would be on his ark if he could save only two. The other? 'Something else,' he says. DVD
1. The Great Escape (1963)
How true to life was the most loved PoW epic of all? Apparently by March 1944, when 76 men tunnelled out, the German guards knew the war was nearly over and were happy to be bribed with cigarettes. And in the tunnels the men's poor diet meant that their bowels were so loose they often had to go to the loo right there and then, which I don't recall happening to Charles Bronson. No matter, Steve McQueen on a motorbike is immortal and that theme tune became the whistled soundtrack to every great escape since. Sky/Now