Disc Four - Season 01 : Episode 15 – “Gone Away” (Part Two) by John Brason
With a brief recap of the concluding scene from the previous week this second part picks up the action following our four escapees entry into the kitchen building. Further to freeing the restraining bolts Pat Grant is able to remove the bars on the kitchen window and the men look out to the German courtyard beyond. Once the five piece band (comprising of accordion, trombone, trumpet, saxophone, drums plus a conductor) practicing in Colonel Creston’s quarters begin playing our escaping quartet individually make their way out of the room, along the nearby rooftops and then down and across the cobbled courtyard. The seemingly excessive length of this endeavour shows on the strained, sweat tinged faces of the musicians ever aware that their playing holds the fate of the success of their escapee colleagues. Naturally the nocturnal jazz music wafting down from the Colonel’s quarters alerts Ulman who quickly rushes into bring this activity to an end. Pat Grant heads towards the main door however using a set of keys he soon discovers that none of them have the desired effect. Disconsolate he returns to the others leading them to come up with an alternate strategy. The four men then elect to crawl through a ground level grating into a cellar however Dick Player falls into some foul smelling water. On the other side of this lower ground room there is a ten by eighteen inch grill, passable only if the men remove their coats. Going in and up it then leads to a barred grating which once the soldier and guard dog has moved off our quartet emerge, cross the short distance to a cliff face and then make their way down the sheer drop thanks to the rope they were carrying. Once they reach the bottom the four men rush across the ground to the side of a German barracks where they carefully made their way around the building so as to avoid disturbing either the soldiers inside or their guard dogs which were billeted in wire mesh kennel cages outside. This whole initial phase of the escape attempt takes up half the entire running time of the episode and at this point our escapers divide into two pairs. Whilst (Dick) Player and (Peter) Muir disappear into the night, their fate unknown to the viewers, the stories attention now focuses entirely on the endeavours of (Pat) Grant and (Bill) Carrington. In the next shot we see Pat leaning over to taste the water beside a lake at the edge of a forest before waking his companion from his slumber. We then see the two men, back in darkness carefully making their way around a building whilst the third shot has our escaping duo approaching a German checkpoint, in the forest, in broad daylight. Surely this is a bit of a sequencing goof or are they trying to indicate that more time than expected has passed? Anyway Carrington and Grant eventually reach a train station where Pat seems to do a reasonably convincing job of arranging tickets for himself and his friend. There is a degree of tension on the train when the Gestapo board at Regensburg however Pat again is fortunate that both the behaviour and the documentation of the escaping pair seem to adequately convince. We next have a shot of a torch being shone in Carrington’s face and Bill looks back at a German officer and a plain clothes wearing woman with viewers thinking ‘oh no they’ve finally been found out!’ However when we pull back it transpires that the woman is an usher showing the German to a seat in a cinema to which our duo have gained entry. The pair watch archive news footage with suitably stony complexions whilst around them other members of the audience show more emotion like for example laughing at soldiers messing about in water. Throughout this story you keep expecting Grant and Carrington’s luck to run out with many occasions where you think something will happen to give their true identity away. Carrington leaving his suitcase behind at the cinema and the pair later talk with a farmer in the arctic winter landscape towards the end of the story are good examples of this and you are left guess right up until the final scene as to whether they will be successful or if they’d be back in next weeks episode. Part Two of “Gone Away” certainly has a distinctly different feel to the preceding establishing offering with a greatly reduced cast, minimal dialogue and considerable use of location filming. Obviously for a new viewer like myself its rather jarring after so many previous episodes of character interaction within the established confines of Colditz castle but despite this there’s certainly dramatically engaging merit to this conclusion to the series only two part story.
