a5c7b9f00b A prisoner of war working at a zoo gets the chance to escape from the Germans, so he does and he takes with him the elephant that he&#39;s been caring for. Together they head for the Swiss border and freedom. In WW2, captured British soldier Stephen Brooks is on a prison train to Germany.On the train he meets an American prisoner, Packy, who&#39;s obsessed with escaping.Brooks tries to temper Packy and reminds him that escaped prisoners are shot if recaptured.Packy is insistent despite Brooks&#39; warnings. On arrival at the POW camp Stalag 7A, Brooks and other fellow POWs are sent to work at the local Munich zoo, to care for the animals.Brooks is assigned to care for Lucy the elephant.The German caretaker in charge of Lucy is asked to train Brooks in his new job.At first, Brooks hates the assignment, considering the large amount of animal waste to be cleaned daily.However, he eventually becomes attached to Lucy the elephant.After a devastating bombing raid that kills some of the animals and zoo staff it is decided to evacuate the surviving animals.Lucy is scheduled to be transported by train to Innsbruck, Austria.On the departure day, the train is commandeered by a moody SS Colonel, for his troops.The colonel jokes that Brooks can walk the elephant all the way to Austria, if he wishes.The joke gives Brooks the idea of walking the elephant to Austria, with two armed guards and a Polish maidcook.The Munich Zoo director, worried for Lucy&#39;s safety, agrees to evacuate her and send her to Austria on foot.Two soldiers provide the armed guard.One is Willy,a friendly Austrian soldier, and the other is Kurt,a brutal German soldier who gets drunk often, insults everyone and threatens to shoot the elephant.The group leaves Munich on a sunny day but the voyage to Austria isn&#39;t a promenade in the park when they start running into trouble. Michael J. Pollard does, to an extent, spoil every scene he is in.<br/><br/>I think that the main problem that Oliver Reed is one of the finest actors of the past thirty years - all brooding menace and power bubbling under the surface. Considering his roleBill Sykes (the ultimate depiction of a vicious character), he is quite believable here.<br/><br/>However Pollard hams up his role and plays it like a smacked up hippy. I can&#39;t imagine that the French Resistance fighters would have followed him for an instance, and I am sorry to say he is badly miscast here.<br/><br/>The film is also, to an extent, a little derivative, with some pretty shoddy direction. It does have some superb cinematography which helps balance this out, but to be honest its a film to watch on December 27th when you have had your fill of Christmas cheer and just fancy something light. WWII story with a light touch has Hannibal Brooks, a British POW in Germany, volunteering to care for one of the zoo animals left vulnerable by the bombing; he&#39;s assigned Lucy, an Asian elephant. After the zoo is destroyed by fire, Brooks, a female cook and two German soldiers are instructed to accompany Lucy across the Swiss border–a journey which will also provide crafty Brooks with the opportunity to escape. Something different from director Michael Winner, known at that time for his &#39;mod&#39; British dramas (although the colorful stories told about Winner during production show that the filmmaker had not misplaced his bad boy persona). The screenplay by Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement, based on a story by Winner and Tom Wright, has some basis in fact, and yet it&#39;s a very patchy film. The cinematography and scoring are lovely, and Oliver ReedBrooks gives a charmingly unforced performance, but the third act with American escapee Michael J. Pollard helping Reed defeat the Nazis is wearing. Pollard was riding high on the success of &quot;Bonnie and Clyde&quot; two years before, but he&#39;s clearly not the star here, nor is Reed. It takes a delightful pachyderm to upstage these wily men, not to mention the entire German army. ** from ****
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