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''The Wooden Horse'' is a 1950 British Second World War war film starring Leo Genn, Anthony Steel and David Tomlinson and directed by Jack Lee. It is based on the book of the same name by Eric Williams, who also wrote the screenplay.〔Williams, Eric, ''The Wooden Horse'' (Collins, 1949)〕 The film depicts the true events of an escape attempt made by POWs in the German POW camp Stalag Luft III. The wooden horse in the title of the film is a piece of exercise equipment the prisoners used to conceal their escape attempt as well as a reference to the Trojan Horse which was also used to conceal men within. It was shot in a low-key style, with a limited budget and a cast including many amateur actors. ==Plot== The somewhat fictionalised version of the true story is set in Stalag Luft III — the same POW camp where the real events depicted in the film ''The Great Escape'' took place, albeit from a different compound – and involved Williams, Michael Codner and Oliver Philpot, all inmates of the camp. In the book and film, the escapees are renamed "Flight Lieutenant Peter Howard", "Captain John Clinton" and "Philip Rowe". The prisoners are faced with the problem of digging an escape tunnel despite the accommodation huts, within which the tunnel entrance could be concealed, being a considerable distance from the perimeter fence. They came up with an ingenious way of digging the tunnel with its entrance located in the middle of an open area relatively near the perimeter fence and using a vaulting horse (constructed largely from plywood from Canadian Red Cross parcels) to cover the entrance. Recruiting fellow-prisoners to form a team of vaulters, each day they carry the horse out to the same spot, with a man hidden inside. The prisoners begin a gymnastic exercise using the vaulting horse, while the concealed man digs down below the horse. At the finish of the exercises, the digger places wooden boards, cut to fit the aperture, in the hole, and fills the space with sandbags and dry sand kept for the purpose – wet sand taken from below the surface would be darker and hence give away the activities. Eventually, as the tunnel lengthens, two men are hidden inside the horse while a larger group of men exercised, the two men continuing the tunnel digging. At the end of the day, they again conceal the tunnel entrance and hide inside the horse while it is carried back to their hut. They also devise a method of disposing of the earth coming out of the tunnel. They recruit a third man, Phil, to assist them, with the promise that he will join the escape. At the final break-out, Howard hides in the tunnel during an ''Appell'' (roll call), before three men are carried over in the horse: the third to replace the tunnel trap. Howard and Clinton travel by train to the Baltic port of Lübeck; (in fact, they travelled via Frankfurt to Stettin). Phil elects to travel alone, posing as a Norwegian margarine manufacturer and travelling by train via Danzig (now Gdańsk). He was the first to make it to neutral territory. Howard and Clinton contact French workers and through them meet 'Sigmund', a Danish resistance worker who smuggles them onto a Danish ship. They then have to transfer to a fishing boat and arrive in Copenhagen, before being shipped to Sweden. There they meet Phil, who arrived earlier. Some details from Williams' book were not used in the film, e.g. the escaped POWs discussing the possibility of visiting potentially neutral brothels in Germany, an idea that was abandoned because of fear that it might be a trap. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Wooden Horse」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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