An East Germany movie I prefer

After yesterday's showing of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, it's nice to see TCM showing another movie about East Germany, and one that I enjoy, even if it generally isn't considered as good. No, not One, Two, Three, but Escape From East Berlin, airing at 4:00 PM ET this afternoon.

The title of the movie is quite accurate. After the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, it understandbly became much more difficult for those trapped inside Communist East Germany to escape to the West. Still, people tried -- and got shot for it, something we see at the very beginning of the movie. Don Murray stars as Kurt Schröder a friend of a man who was shot and killed during an escape attempt. He's got a relatively cushy job as a chauffeur for party apparatchiks, but when the dead man's sister comes around wondering what's happened to her brother, Kurt begins to have a bit of a conscience. Eventually, this leads to an attempt to escape to the West -- by tunneling under the Berlin Wall! (In reality, there were people desperate enough to try this.)

The rest of Escape From East Berlin is fairly standard prison-break stuff: having to create ruses to cover up the tunneling attempt (in this case, an oompah band making enough noise to hide the sounds of the drilling), run the risk that there's a traitor in their midst, willing to turn them in to the East German authorities (and the Stasi had a huge reach in East Germany), and the fear of the tunnel caving in, among others. Still, the movie is competenly made.

That having been said, it might have been more interesting to see some escape stories that hewed closer to what really happened, since the truth was often times far more fascinating that what Hollywood could think up. Consider, for example, the family who escaped Czechoslovakia in a "raincoat balloon".