This Harlech Television production follows a woman who searches for her RAF pilot son, who was shot down over Germany in 1941.
Getting no help from the underground, Jenny Baines (Dyan Cannon) disguises herself as a (male) prisoner and smuggles herself into a German POW camp to rescue her son, Peter (Hugh Grant).
Elke Sommer plays Eva Gruenberg, a friend who has turned her country house into a brothel in which Jenny hides for a while before going to the POW camp.
Incredibly based on actual events, the production took untold liberties with the real story, casting the English mother (Florence Barrington from County Durham, who lived in Stalag IVB for three months in 1944 to be near her son, Winston, who was shot down in his Wellington bomber) as an American, claiming that it was Jenny’s husband, Luftwaffe pilot Karl (Hartmut Becker), who shot down her son (which wasn’t true) and introducing multiple historical errors, especially in the German uniforms.
Most of the action scenes were also pure fiction. The £5 million miniseries was part-funded by Columbia Pictures and clearly made with the American market in mind.
The series was filmed in and around Ollerton, Nottinghamshire, with the German POW camp scenes shot at Proteus Army Training Camp in Sherwood Forest.
Leipzig station – decorated with swastikas and with 150 men in German uniforms thronging the platforms, was, in fact, Marylebone station in London, taken over for a Sunday morning, while a school near Tewkesbury represented Leipzig Gestapo HQ.
Towards the end of shooting, some of the extras were recruited for close-up work, and as the first assistant director made his way down the line of hopefuls, he finally reached Jackie Hamilton, a well-known Liverpool comic.
To his surprise, the Scouser was told that he simply wasn’t suitable. “Why?” he asked. The AD said, “To be honest, you’re supposed to be all skinny and haggard from months without decent food. Look at you! You’re fat, red-faced, and you’ve got a boozer’s nose.”
To which Hamilton apparently quipped, “I know, but I only got captured yesterday!”
The real Florence Barrington died in 1976, aged 78.
Jenny Baines
Dyan Cannon Eva Gruenberg
Elke Sommer Klein
Robert Hardy Steinhardt
Patrick Ryecart Colonel
Nigel Hawthorne Captain Preston
Christopher Cazenove General Benjamin Cutler
Richard Todd Karl Koenig
Hartmut Becker Johns
Denis Lill Wilford
Garfield Morgan Schumann
Michael Elphick Colonel Weiss
Oscar Quitak Padre
Philip Stone Peter Baines
Hugh Grant Higgins
Tim Bannerman Paddy
Mick Ford Paul Schroeder
Jeremy Bulloch Gerta
Erika Hoffman Bromley
Sam Kelly Sgt. Mitchell
Jonathan Coy Sgt. Davies
Frank Jarvis Pvt. Smith
David Milner Stanson
Richard Driscoll
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Incredibly based on actual events, the production took untold liberties with the real story, casting the English mother (Florence Barrington from County Durham, who lived in Stalag IVB for three months in 1944 to be near her son, Winston, who was shot down in his Wellington bomber) as an American, claiming that it was Jenny’s husband, Luftwaffe pilot Karl (Hartmut Becker), who shot down her son (which wasn’t true) and introducing multiple historical errors, especially in the German uniforms.
