Reeling Backward: Albert R.N. (1953)
A low-key war drama as Allied POWs try to escape from their camp and wrestle with the moral consequences of who gets to go.
I’ve always been fascinated by prisoner of war movies. There’s just something compelling about the combination of the confined spaces, the various machinations to escape and cover up the attempts, and the struggle between defeated soldiers and their captors to navigate the rules of the forced relationship between them.
“The Great Escape” was one of the first classic films I fell in love with as a boy, and I’ve enjoyed exploring numerous other iterations of the genre, which has proved to be popular and enduring. Even in modern times, we still occasionally get a good POW movie like “Unbroken.”
Indeed, my all-time favorite film is “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
“Albert R.N.” is very much a downmarket, lower-key POW movie. It’s based on real events that happened at the Marlog O camp in northern Germany where the prisoners created a collapsible dummy they used to fool the guards’ headcounts while one of their numbers made an escape attempt.
As an escape ploy, Albert — the R.N. is to indicate his fictitious status as a British Royal Navy officer — was not terribly successful. He was only used twice, and in both cases the escapee was recaptured. But it makes for an interesting set-up for a movie, and the POW who created the actual dummy, John Worsley (who would go on to become a noted artist), recreated it for the film.
(The original was discovered and confiscated by the Germans.)
As a concoction of paper mache, paint, a wire harness and clothing, Albert is pretty convincing onscreen as a human figure, if one doesn’t look too closely. Two POWs would march on either side of Albert, each with one arm looped under his. His various parts would be quickly broken down and smuggled by the prisoners on their way to their weekly shower.
One man would stay behind, Albert would take his place for the return headcount, and the escapee would wait until everyone was gone to make his getaway. His compatriots would even continue the ruse for nightly headcounts to give him several days’ head start.
If you’re skeptical POWs could assemble such a good doppelganger from the scraps of supplies available to them, the movie actually underplays Albert’s qualities, if anything. The original one could even blink its eyes.
The film was produced in 1953 during the busy British postwar film industry, which tended to make movies very quickly and cheaply. Director Lewis Gilbert was then a young journeyman filmmaker, cranking out no less than 11 features between 1950-54.
He would go on to direct many notable films including “Alfie,” “Educating Rita” and several James Bond flicks. In all his film career spanned 60 years and included one Oscar nomination (as a producer on “Alfie”). Over the last 15 years, I’ve profiled several of his films.
“Albert R.N.” was not a big hit in the U.S., mostly owing to not having any big American stars like Steve McQueen and James Garner in “Escape.” It was released on these shores under the title “Break to Freedom.”
Two actual British POWs, Guy Morgan and Edward Sammis, learned of the story of Albert and wrote a play about it, which was subsequently turned into a screenplay by Morgan and Vernon Harris. They obviously take a few creative liberties, building some tension between the men and especially with the Germans’ sadistic second-in-command, SS Hauptsturmführer Schultz (Anton Diffring). There’s an ongoing subplot about Shultz’ lust for one of the prisoner’s expensive chronometer.
Jack Warner plays Captain Maddox, the senior British officer at the camp who must approve all escape attempts. He’s a pleasing paternalistic figure without much of a real presence, popping out of his private quarters to settle arguments or make decisions. As the story opens, their attempt to dig a tunnel under the wire collapses, leaving the camp’s reputation as “escape proof” intact.
William Sylvester plays “Texas” Norton, the new American prisoner who acts as the audience’s ears and eyes during the early going. He’s young, brash and impatient, and is constantly egging on his mostly British colleagues to be more aggressive in their escape attempts.
Eddie Byrne has an interesting role as Joe Brennan, a surly Irishman and the POWs’ second-in-command, who takes an instant dislike to Tex. (Though it’s never overtly stated, Albert seems to have been modeled after him.) We later learn he’s convinced the American’s many boastful descriptions of his affair with a blond British female officer is actually his wife.
Indeed, aside from surviving and escaping, the foremost topic on most of the prisoners’ minds is what their womenfolk are up to back home. The movie does a good job of showing the nervous energy thrumming just below the surface of their stiff-upper-lip acts. If a few letters from home get misplaced in the mail, it can send a man into a tailspin.
The biggest worrier is Geoffrey Ainsworth (Anthony Steel), the stand-in for Worsley, the creator of Albert. He has been a POW for more than three years and started a pen pal relationship with a widow in England who volunteered to write to lonely prisoners. Even though they have never met and he doesn’t even know what she looks like, Geoff considers her his fiance. He’s even prepared to be a father to her young son after the war.
As the guy who came up with the ruse for Albert, everyone assumes Geoff will be given first crack at escaping. But he’s become so convinced that his woman has found another lover, he insists upon a lottery to pick the winner. That man makes it out but is eventually killed by the Germans. (In real life, he survived and was returned to the camp.)
At 89 minutes, the movie is quite fast-paced and tends to let what character-building there is happen in service to the plot, rather than the other way around. It makes for a decently engrossing POW story without any really engaging personalities that emerge.
“Albert R.N.” has been released an excellent new double feature Blu-ray issue from Kino Lorber, the other being another Lewis Gilbert WWII drama, “The Sea Shall Not Have Them,” made the following year.