Reeling Backward: "The League of Gentlemen" (1960)

There was a time when Jack Hawkins was Britain's top movie star. This might not seem likely, since he didn't get serious about acting until he was about 40 and, while certainly handsome, his bulldog-like visage did not naturally lend itself to romantic or leading roles.

Nevertheless, his skills as a thespian kept him quite busy in movie-making even after his star fell, usually in supporting roles as authoritarian figures -- sometimes deluded ones -- in "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "Lawrence of Arabia" and many others. A heavy smoker, Hawkins even continued to act after having his larynx removed in 1965 due to throat cancer; other actors dubbed his lines until his death at age 62.

"The League of Gentlemen" represents one of his few post-1950s leading roles. It's a bank heist movie directed by Basil Dearden with a distinctive, clever twist: the robbers are not professional criminals but former British military officers who have fallen on hard times. Not only is it a chance for the eight men to collect £100,000 each -- about $2 million in today's dollars -- but they get to use their wartime skills in a peacetime setting.

As Lt. Col. Norman Hyde, Hawkins is the unctuous brains of the operation. The only one lacking a criminal record or black mark on his military dossier, he's incensed at being cashiered after 25 years of loyal service, dismissed "redundant." He certainly doesn't appear to want for money -- Hyde lives in a large, secluded mansion and drives a Rolls-Royce. In the film's tipsy opening sequence, he emerges from a sewer grate at night wearing a natty black tuxedo.

There appears to be more backstory there, but screenwriter John Boland, adapting the novel by Bryan Forbes, purposefully keeps it close to the vest. Hyde lives alone, out of choice rather than economic necessity, and lets the dishes pile up in the kitchen. There is a large portrait of a handsome woman in the foyer -- actually Deborah Kerr -- and when asked if she is his wife and is she alive, he announces, "Regrettably, the bitch is still going strong."

Testy language for 1960! I was also surprised by a brief shot of a chestful of nudie magazines, with bare breasts clearly visible.

Hyde researches the military records to find the perfect other seven men for the job:

• Lt. Edward Lexy (Richard Attenborough ... I know, I'm fixated) -- Radio man and somewhat weaselly ladies' man.
• Maj. Peter Race (Nigel Patrick) -- An itinerant gambler and black marketeer of impeccable breeding, he becomes Hyde's second-in-command after an initial antagonism.
• Captain "Padre" Mycroft (Roger Livesey) -- A quartermaster dismissed for gross indecency, he now impersonates a priest.
• Maj. Rupert Rutland-Smith (Terence Alexander) -- A decent, reserved chap kept economic cuckold by his wealthy, younger wife.
• Capt. Frank Weaver (Norman Bird) -- Bomb disposal leader who was drunk when his squad was blown up.
• Capt. Stevens (Kieron Moore) -- Ousted for homosexuality -- "odd man out" is how Hyde describes him, in the only suitable language for the time -- he's reliable muscle.
• Capt. Martin Porthill (Bryan Forbes) -- Booted for killing Greek separatists, he now sponges off older women.

Despite a limited amount of time to personalize each character, the actors do a wonderful job of building a distinctive persona that allows them to stand out from each other. Attenborough and Livesey in particularly are quite charismatic, in very different ways. Livesey steals the show in a sequence where they impersonate active-duty military officers to steal arms from the local army station. He pretends to be a general and uses the opportunity to lord it over Hyde and Race.

There's a lovely fun scene where Hyde first gathers them all at a swanky club, after having invited them to read an American pulp fiction novel, "The Golden Fleece," that describes exactly the sort of bank robbery Hyde is proposing. After declaring them all "crooks of one sort or another," he proceeds to detail each man's shame individually, and then declare the operation as their chance to get their revenge on the system that betrayed them.

The rest of the movie proceeds as a fairly typical crime caper: the planning of the job, brushes with danger, internal conflicts between the men, followed by the actual heist itself. It goes off perfectly, but their little company -- which they cheekily dub "Co-Operative Removals Ltd." -- is betrayed by the one small detail they overlooked.

British movies were not covered by the Hollywood Production Code, in which lawbreakers always had to be shown receiving their comeuppance. But that appears to be the case with "The League of Gentlemen," in which they are all carted off in the same policy lorry at the end.

The robbery scene is almost anticlimactic. It's mostly notable for the scary-looking gas masks the men wear after smoking out the whole block around the bank. Complete with breathing tubes and a metallic voice projection device used by Hyde, they make for a positively frightening bunch.

I enjoyed "League" for what it is, a rapscallion crime caper, though I admit to being a bit disappointed that it was not what I thought it would be. I expected a harder-edged serious crime drama, something like Stanley Kubrick's early work, in which Hyde is consumed by rage at British societal structure and bent on revenge.

But this isn't existential crisis; it's fun 'n' games. That's all well and fine, but I'd like to see the version where Hawkins gets to play a homicidal maniac in a tux.

Reeling Backward: "The One That Got Away" (1957)

The victors of every war write the history of it, and usually the artistic renditions, too. We're used to all World War II films depicting the Allies as the good guys, the Germans (or at least Nazis) as evil warmongers, and all exploits of heroism and daring are restricted to our side.

But fantastic stories and tales of bravery happen in every armed conflict, and on every side. Whenever I watch a propaganda film from that era, even a good one, I always wonder why we never see the corresponding movies from Germany or Japan. Surely they were produced -- were they simply destroyed by the conquerors?

I remember when "Das Boot" came out in the early 1980s, and some observers decried the fact that a mainstream movie dared to portray German submariners in favorable terms usually reserved for American G.I.s.

Lo, then, to discover a 1957 film that more or less unambiguously portrays a German P.O.W. heroically escaping from the clutches of his Allied captors -- and made in England, no less! True, the British (and later, Canadian) guards are never shown doing anything cruel or spiteful, the way numerous other films do like "The Great Escape" or "The Bridge on the River Kwai."

But there's no doubting that Franz von Werra is the hero of the film, or that the audience is meant to admire and root for him.

It was the first major role by Hardy Krüger that got him noticed by American and English audiences, and for a time he was Germany's top actor. It's a typical role for Krüger, playing a character whose self-assurance borders on -- and often spills over into -- arrogance. Still, we identify with von Werra because of his perseverance and puckish charm.

The character is not terribly different from Steve McQueen's star-making role in "Great Escape" -- the dedicated escape artist who single-mindedly focuses on getting out of enemy clutches.

The story is helped by the fact that it is based on historical fact -- von Werra is still believed to be the only Axis prisoner of war who escaped and eventually made his way back to his homeland. The real von Werra became a celebrity and trained German soldiers on British interrogation techniques. It's even been suggested his story influenced Germany to start treating its own P.O.W.s better.

The film, directed by Roy Ward Baker from a screenplay by Howard Clewes, is based upon a book by James Leasor and Kendal Burt. As near as I can tell, the movie actually follows the recorded facts of von Werra's repeated escape attempts fairly accurate, and actually omits other attempts.

In all, the movie shows three escapes, steadily increasing in daring. In the first one, he simply rests on top of a stone wall during an exercise hike, and while the British guards are distracted he rolls off the top to the opposite side and runs into the woods. After a number of days in the freezing English fields, he's discovered in a mud gully.

Next, he tunnels out of prison camp along with four other Germans, armed with identity discs and disguises. Rather than attempting to run from authorities, von Werra brazenly goes straight to them, claiming to be a downed Dutch pilot trying to get back to his unit in Aberdeen. His plan is to snatch a British plane and fly back to the continent, and he gets all the way into the cockpit of an experimental Hurricane before the duty officer pulls a gun on him.

Imagine if he's been just a minute or two later, and von Werra had managed to not only escape, but bring a vital bit of wartime technology with him! We'd be saying his name in the same sentence as aviators like Charles Lindbergh and the Wright brothers.

Shipped off to Canada, von Werra is stuck on a four-day train ride west, and manages to open a frozen window and jump out of the speeding locomotive while his fellow P.O.W.s distract the Canadian guards by miming diarrhea. He then makes an iron man crossing of the (mostly) frozen St. Lawrence River and turns himself into the American police.

Because these events happened in 1940, the U.S. was still a neutral country in the war, while Canada -- as a subject nation to the British crown -- was not. The film ends here, but von Werra was slipped over the Mexican border by the German consul while American and Canadian officials squabbled over his extradition.

Another interesting thing about "The One That Got Away" is that no other characters stick around for very long other than the protagonist. Von Werra is pitted against a variety of British and Canadian military types, confounding one after the other. The only real secondary character who sticks in memory is the unnamed British interrogator (Michael Goodliffe) who has a bantering duel with von Werra near the beginning, and the men come to regard each other with an adversarial but convivial respect.

By making von Werra the only person the audience really has to hold onto, the film underlines the audience's identification with him.

3 stars out of four