The Last Escape (1970)

 

Last week, I posted about acquiring and reading the paperback novelization of a movie I watched on TV when I was maybe 11 or 12 years old. In the course of tracking down the paperback, I found the movie on YouTube.

Usually, when revisiting books or movies I haven't seen since I was an angelic little one, I discover I had excellent taste. Whether it be a movie such as The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh or a Young Adult novel set during World War II, I had impeccible taste.

Well, The Last Escape (1970) is yet another discovery from my youth. The novelization I reviewed last week is close enough to the film so that it can largely cover the plot of the movie, though I will say that the book added a much more satisfying death for the S.S. officer who had been pursuing the escaping good guys.

I did enjoy watching The Last Escape again. It's got a good plot and Stuart Whitman is appropriately tough as lead protagonist--a professional soldier who is trying to get a difficult job done. The two scenes that I vividly remembered--having a particular emotional impact on 12-year-old me--were still pretty cool. These were the agent who yelled "Trap!" even though he knew he'd be killed by doing so and the Russian tank commander who gives up trying to stop the escaping scientist rather than fire on women and children. 

But as an adult, I was conscious of the movie's failings, most of which are brought about by the obviously low budget. The use of stock footage is a little too obvious and it stands out that both Allied agents and German soldiers invaribly used MP40 submachine guns (what the Allies inaccurately called a Schmeisser). I suspect that there were a relatively small number of prop guns available and that these were shared between extras depending on who what being filmed at any given moment. Several of the action scenes have a more epic feel in the novelization, because budget restrictions don't exist in prose fiction. 

But all the same, I enjoyed seeing The Last Escape again. It might not have turned out to be as awesome as some of the other stuff I've rediscovered as an adult, but it was worth watching one more time.