Director: Guy Hamilton
Starring: John Mills, Christopher Rhodes, Lionel Jeffries, Bryan Forbes, Anton Diffring, Theodore Bikel
More info: IMDb
Tagline: The stirring, amazing adventure of how British, French, Dutch, Pollish and Canadian P.O.W.'s escaped from Germany's "escape-proof" castle!
Plot: Allied prisoners of various nationalities pool their resources to plan numerous escapes from an "escape-proof" German POW camp housed in a Medieval castle.
My rating: 8/10
Will I watch it again? Yup.
If you dig WWII prison camp movies like THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963) then you're going to LOVE this one. It's kind of like ESCAPE but with a shitload more escape attempts. It's not as elaborate as the film that came 8 years later but it's got some wonderful performances (Rhodes, Mills, etc), suspense and a great score by Francis Chagrin (the opening music is intense!). COLDITZ is probably closer to the truth than ESCAPE and it's also less fanciful and big budgeted which gives it that edge; that and the nice black & white, widescreen photography. I bought this as part of a British war collection box set on the cheap some years ago. Every film in it (five in total) are very, very good. It's a shame that Anchor Bay set is out of print. But at least you can get in on Netflix.
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