Two British films drawn from reality about stiff-upper-lipped Englishmen stoically doing the right thing, simply because it’s right. There’s more texture to Oliver Parker and William Ivory’s The Great Escaper, simply because Michael Caine’s decrepit old buffer causes all sorts of consternation back home when he does a bunk from his care home, and therefore it’s possible to attribute negative motivations to his actions. This film also benefits from keeping its stars (Caine and Glenda Jackson) centre-stage for much of the running time – the flashbacks to young Caine are kept to a minimum.

It doesn’t outstay its welcome, but it does feel like it’s running on rails, and ends up reaching for a catharsis which seems forever out of its reach. Its most interesting moments are those when Bernie takes a different path – visiting a comrade’s grave and missing out on the big show which was his ostensible reason for going. Spare a thought for John Standing and Victor Oshin who do nice work but get no plaudits. For one brief moment, as Bernie shares a salute with equally decrepit Germans who were firing machine guns at British troops during the Normandy landings, there’s a flicker of something much deeper, more profound and incredibly moving. But Parker swiftly moves back to the feelgood old-folks charm.

I remember watching the episode of That’s Life in which Esther Rantzen surprised Nicholas Winton with an audience full of the now grown-up children whose lives he’d saved by arranging their escape from occupied Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. It’s practically impossible to watch without bursting into tears. If you want to watch it, a YouTube search will bring it up. Or you could watch One Life which plods its way towards the same endpoint.

Anthony Hopkins is the big ticket here, but the 1930s stuff is vastly more interesting, where we have to make do with Johnny Flynn (hilariously broad in the West End as Richard Burton at the moment), but get consolation prizes in the form of Helena Bonham Carter and Romola Garai. There’s fine evocation of time and place in these scenes, but I was left waiting for Hopkins to come back and then bored by much of what he was doing. As a hymn to the virtues of stubbornness, politeness and diligent paperwork, this is suitably stirring, but nothing can ever come close to the impact of watching that BBC broadcast, despite the best efforts of cast and crew.

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