During the War years, many a soldier were given specific instructions concerning their duties. After the war, just as many came under the scrutiny of justice. The Nazis were grossly mistaken when those accused of atrocious war crimes against humanity sought the protection of obeying explicit or direct orders. In this film " The McKenzie Break " German navel officers in a P.O.W camp are given secret orders to help 28 submariners escape and return to duty. As such they begin causing an inordinate amount of trouble for the English guards, to the point that general Kerr (Jack Watson) is puzzled by their antics. Unable to fathom the reason, Captain Jack Connor, an intelligent officer (Brian Keith) {supurb acting} is given tactical command over the camp run by Major Perry (Ian Hendry) to ascertain the reason. While there, Connor engages in mind games with Captain Willy Schlueter (Helmut Griem) a German Submarine commander. Time is short as Schlueter must complete an underground tunnel, before Connors' amasses enough evidence to prosecute his adversary for murder or deciphers the secret codes in the letters he confiscated. When the escape is prematurely forced, both men struggle to complete their assignments. Although not on the caliber of The Great Escape, this movie nevertheless gives a stirring and dramatic performance to excite audiences and the cast renders a good account of themselves. A top notch film which has since become a military Classic. ****

The McKenzie Break refers to a prison in Scotland during World War II where some German prisoners are very anxious to get back to the fight as they see it. This is the early war years and the only prisoners there are Luftwaffe and Sailors, more specifically prisoners taken off captured U-Boats.McKenzie Prison is in for some big trouble, commander Ian Hendry can smell it. It's due to the presence of U-Boat captain Helmut Griem who has taken over the leadership of the prisoners unofficially. Griem plays Captain Willy Schluetter as I conceive Reinhard Heydrich to be, a handsome charismatic leader, totally dedicated to the Nazi cause and one stone cold killer.British Intelligence in trying to get to the bottom of things sends Captain Brian Keith who from his accent I'm guessing is an Ulster Protestant. Keith's a smart guy, but just maybe a bit too smart for his own good.The McKenzie Break is dominated by Helmut Griem as well it should be. This man has to dominate or otherwise the film would make no sense at all. As charismatic as Griem is as Schluetter, he's both fascinating and repellent. His objective is to get as many U-Boat people back into the fight. He will sacrifice everything to achieve that objective and I do mean everything.Sad to say this film is a forgotten gem and deserves to be better remembered than it is. Catch it by all means if it's broadcast, you will enjoy the surprise ending when neither Keith or Griem get everything they want.

When a sub-genre is established in the wonderfully diverse cosmology of film, you can bet that someone in this post-modern, media savvy world will add to it. Only they'll have knowing winks to the audience when the usual hoops are jumped through or they'll play with those expectations and pull the rug out from under you by subverting them and twisting the plot. We all know the score, they know we know, we know they know we know ad infinitum, or more often, nauseam. It comes as a surprise to me that someone was at this in 1970 with a humble POW movie.The inmates are tunnelling out. Dummies in for escapees at roll call, check. Uniforms manufactured in camp, check. Tunnel cave-in during the escape, check. It's not all by the numbers though. We have a vaulting horse. No tunnel mouth there though as you can see right under it. Good topsoil on the turnip patch, but that's not where they're hiding the spoil. That this is a British POW camp the those escaping are German prisoners is unusual and welcome. Maybe the biggest twist of all is that the whole escape has been rumbled by the authorities, but they let them escape in order to net a bigger prize.OK, it's not as knowing as anything since 1994, but it does play with the genre well, albeit a little ham-fistedly at time. Underneath the genre trappings there's a good little drama with a central duel between an Irish Captain in British Intelligence and the U-Boat Commander commanding officer in camp. Both are willing to bend and break the rules in pursuit of their aims. One of them will even kill to achieve his aims. Both are highly flawed individuals. Both are self-centred and neither of them succeed. From a simple set up at the start, the film reaches a fresh and unexpected conclusion to give a true stand-out film.There are some clumsy cuts and overlays to demonstrate simultaneous actions in various locations as the escape progresses that really don't work and the drive of the second half of the film falls flat. The feuds within the camp, both that between captors and captives and between the Luftwaffe and the Submariners, are edgy. The tension created evaporates as soon as the escapees are out of the camp. It all gets a little clunky. However, overall this is a good film and definitely one to watch if you like your post-modernism freshly minted from the 70s.

'The McKenzie Break' is very much in the tradition of the POW movie that seemingly dominated British screens in the 1950s. There is the same elaborate tunnelling; the same stand-off between Brit and Nazi, prisoner and commandant; an introduction of a theatrical scene to emphasise the idea of role-playing to deceive one's enemy. There is the same pitting a maverick officer against his staid, by-the-book superior. There is the tense, suspenseful escape scene, and a rejection of easy, American-style heroics. Character is reduced to short-hand. Despite the greater mobility and fluidity of the camerawork, making certain scenes very vivid, the film's violence belongs more to the 1950s than the blood-soaked era of Peckinpah and Penn; and there is absolutely no swearing, even in those more permissive times. The whole film has that admirably dour emphasis on the literal mechanics of plot - of getting the job done - which is unglamorous, but has an integrity that gives you an illusion of realism, and makes the lollipops of escape, suspense or action all the more satisfying.So with the exception of colour, there is very little difference between 'Break' and all those 1950s films invariably starring John Mills and Richards Attenborough and Todd. It even begins with a time-honoured shot, a god's eye view of the camp from the surveilling post, emphasising the see-all power of the confining power. Of course, this surveillance has only access to the surface of things; the escape route is under ground. This is also a metaphor for the game of wits, between the Germans and their respective captors, Major Parry and Captain Conner. Parry, like his sentry, can only see the surface of things, and hence his impasse, symptomatic, as he admits, of his general mediocrity. Conner's job is to look behind the surface: as a crime reporter he is used to infiltrating the underworld; now he must literally search under this world of the first shot. Conner's former job gives the film the air of a transposed policier, with the wily old Inspector trying to nab a fiendishly clever criminal. This point is brought out by the decoy use of police made by the prisoners in the escape.There are a couple of incidental, non-structural changes to the old format that completely revolutionise it. The prisoners are German. Further, they are not sympathetic, non-Nazi Germans as in 'Das Boot', but the kind of glassy fanatics with no compunction in slitting an honourable colleague's neck. And yet they are subversive, attempting to overthrow an established order - the opening scene where they group like striking workers and tackle the soldiers regrouping like shielded police, that must have had an ironic frisson only two years after 1968. In the 1950s POW movies, there was never any attempt to make the soldiers likable - they were tough professionals doing their job; the fact of their Britishness and the shared experience of the war gave the audience the involvement and emotion absent from the films themselves. Narrative logic suggests that we will be on the side of the prisoners, the people who are trying to provoke action - the essence of film - not contain it. And when they do break out there is a sense of excitement, a gush of fresh air (AND surrealism, a small army of disguised Nazis driving through a sleepy Scottish town). But these are Nazis. Rarely has personal morality and narrative demands clashed so disturbingly, in so downbeat a fashion.Further, this typical British movie marginalises the British. The one major figure - played by England's most underrated supporting player, Ian Hendry - is decent enough, but practically useless. The film is a game of chess between a Nazi and an undisciplined Irishman with little gra for order, justice or the English, just a gambling man's love of impossible odds. Maybe it's some hidden patriotism on my part, but Brian Keith is a wonder, a drunken Irishman who seems to be the only one able to establish order, but actually (deliberately?) creates chaos. Seeing as the Irish spent the war in inglorious neutrality, and the IRA supported the Germans, you wonder what exactly the very Irish (and not Anglo-Irish, despite the Trinity College interiors) Conner's motives are - as his German rival says, the Brits have been murdering his ancestors for centuries. It is surely no accident that it was Ireland and Germany who, through a long struggle for Independence, and two World Wars, effectively destroyed the British Empire, hence their superimposition at the end. England may have won the battle...This seems to me the true subject of this excellent film.