Leo Genn wears an unidentified watch

In the exercise yard of a German prison camp, three RAF officers carry a wooden vaulting horse out to the same patch of dirt every afternoon and take turns leaping over it while, hidden inside its frame, a fourth man digs. The Wooden Horse (1950) tells that story almost exactly as it happened. The escape from Stalag Luft III in 1943 was real, and Eric Williams, one of the men who crawled out through the tunnel under the horse, wrote both the best-selling memoir and the screenplay. Jack Lee directed it for Alexander Korda's London Films, leaning on the plain texture of the camp rather than on heroics. Leo Genn plays Peter Howard, one of the diggers, with the dry steadiness of a man who had seen the real thing. Genn had served as a gunner in the Royal Artillery through the war, reached lieutenant colonel, and afterward sat on the team that investigated Bergen-Belsen and helped prosecute its commandant. A POW drama was not, for him, an abstraction.

The watch on his wrist never gets a clear look, no scene holds on the dial, and it stays unidentified, which feels right for a film this spare. There is a real watch in this story, just not on screen. Stalag Luft III, the camp the film depicts, is where Corporal Clive Nutting mail-ordered a steel Rolex Oyster chronograph, reference 3525, straight from Hans Wilsdorf in 1943; Wilsdorf shipped it into the camp and told the prisoner an English gentleman should not think about paying until the war was won. Nutting went on to advise the productions of both The Wooden Horse and, later, The Great Escape. The most famous timepiece tied to this film belonged to its consultant, not to any man in front of the camera.