BlazeLime Strong and Moving!

VeteranLight I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

ianlouisiana "The prison camp was full of British officers who had sworn to die - rather than be captured".So the late - lamented Mr Milligan gently guyed the British P.O.W. film genre which by 1959 was beginning to run out of steam.Let's face it,blokes digging tunnels,comic opera "funny" or sadistic guards,walking around with trousers filled with dirt from the tunnel and doing endless calisthenics in flapping gym shorts can only have a limited appeal to even uncritical English audiences. However,adding the rather louche Mr M.Wilding and nice but dim Mr P.Jones as a kind of chorus was a nice touch by Bryan Forbes in "Danger within" which is otherwise merely competent with all concerned acting within their comfort zones. I am a great admirer of Mr B.Forbes as an actor,writer and director but I don't feel he was pushing the envelope here in any other department. I once worked with a former R.A.F. aircrew who,a week after being gazetted with his DFC was shot down over the Ruhr and spent three years as a guest of our European partners.He told me 90% of the P.O.Ws simply wanted to do their time as peacefully and painlessly as possible and get home in one piece. Those that planned escapes were avoided like Ronnie Stephens the sewer rat in "Danger within",albeit for different reasons. As former officers typed away at their memoirs,that aspect of their imprisonment seems to have somehow been downgraded.

no2-10 It's not too bad and has good pace, although from the comments already made I was expecting a little more. The cast list is nothing special - mostly second string names, bar Richard Attenborough, though Peter Arne manages a good turn as the commandant.But there was much glossing over the catastrophic mistakes they made - getting the wrong man, the continuing escape failures, and even when it's less than certain that the next plan will work, the British commander decides to opt for the most hare-brained plan of them all - insane!The potential 'whodunnit' surrounding why their plans keep failing is missed entirely, suggesting a low budget necessitating plot simplification, which was a pity. Plot holes a-plenty, badly filled in e.g. the late laundry van. Elements of better films could be seen here, but most of the actors seem all too fit and healthy for it to be anything more than a bit of fun, rather than a more serious attempt to portray the conditions in a POW camp.Indeed, the portly British commander (did he get stuck in that hole? - certainly looked like it!) once berates an officer for 'treating the place like a holiday camp'. Well, they're obviously well fed and bathed (enough spare water to clean up the dead man at the start), plenty to smoke, matches (!), candles, they have music, drama (with costume) and sports, sunbathing - why would you want to break out?? ;-)

Aliebarnes Just watched it on Channel 4 and loved it, very good cast and overall very enjoyable.Full of great actors including Richard Attenborough and Tony Todd A bit different from the usual escape movies, in that there's some intrigue and tension caused by a informer within the British ranks this results in the deaths of 4 British prisoners before they finally work out who it is.I do like the 50/60 British films and this is another that i will definitely watch again.

Alice Liddel A rare bright spot in a benighted genre, this British POW drama avoids familiarity not only by avoiding stiff upper lip and grey morality in favour of wit, tension and Hollywood stereotype, but also by a clever use of the metaphors of theatre. Most British war films parade their stifling docudrama-style 'realism'; this is often an excuse for imaginative paucity. 'Danger Within' uses the idea of play to question some of the received myths about the British Second World War.Part of the novelty lies in its North Italian setting - we're so used to nefarious Nazis and brutal Japanese. Not that it makes much difference - the main villain, Capitano Benucci, is a Nazi-trained sadist, who imagines he's suavity incarnate with his sophisticated cigars, laidback walk, time goatie, and clipped, ironical speech. But the blanching sun makes a nice change, giving a parched, sandy feel, and the notorious stereotype of Italian incompetence makes the various plot points believable.What makes this narrative absorbing is not the usual will-they-or-won't-they escape plot, but a kind of detective story. No matter how ingenious the efforts of the escape committee - and there is a brilliant one here involving sewers, light-switches, misplaced cigarettes and rugby posts- there is always the same welcoming committee of armed fascists ready to mow them down. It's clear there's an informer, but who?The obvious culprit is a shifty-looking Greek. This is the film's first daring piece of iconoclasm. There is a lot of anti-Italian racism throughout, but that can be attributed to understandable wartime emotionalism, where contempt for what Fascism stands for is expressed in xenophobia. But the Greek's only obvious credentials for being an informer is the fact of being a Greek, a little small, sweaty, oily, you know, naturally sneaky. When his name is called at roll-call, a wit hurls a dead rat at the officer; we remember Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda that used similar analogies.This is a strangely unideological war these men are fighting - there is no rhetoric about liberty and democracy; this is a prison film in which the criminals, all professionals, want to escape. Everything centres on the job in hand, with loyalty vouchsafed for anyone who agrees. This lack of sentimentality is refreshing an a genre stuffed with secular piety.Even better is the working of the theatrical metaphors. The brilliant opening scene features a prisoner disguised as the commandant - their fatal meeting creates a mirror effect that echoes in the following narrative about, not only duplicity, but also people who don't seem to be what they are, including old fops who turn out to be very brave men. Of course, this is a situation where the Law are murderous criminals, and the prisoners are democratic saviours, ambiguous enough in itself. It creates a world where you don't know who to trust, especially dangerous in a situation where loyalty and trust need to be givens. This idea of acting and pretending (extending to the Capitano) culminates in the attempted escape during 'Hamlet', with the immortal Dennis Price in a mop wig as the Prince. It's a shame they couldn't have picked a more apposite play - King Lear, perhaps? - or worked it in better, with a play-within-a-play scene, for instance, to reveal the murderer. But that would have been silly, contrived, arty, and no British war film would ever be that. Michael Wilding is a bizarre sight in this testosterone heavy atmosphere; even more surprising is how excellent he is with his old queen patter and reserves of steel.