Danger Within

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Danger Within
Directed by	Don Chaffey
Produced by	Colin Lesslie
Written by	Eric Ambler
Starring	Richard Todd Bernard Lee Michael Wilding Richard Attenborough
Distributed by	British Lion Films
Release date(s)	1959
Running time	101 min
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English

Danger Within is a 1959 British war film set in a prisoner of war camp in northern Italy during the summer of 1943.

[edit] Plot

After a clever escape plan fails, the escape committee, led by Lieutenant Colonel David Baird (Richard Todd) suspects that there is an informer in their ranks. The prime candidate is a Greek officer, Lieutenant Coutoules (Cyril Shaps), but when he is found dead in an escape tunnel, all thoughts of an informer die down. To explain his death to the Italian captors, his body is placed in an abandoned tunnel within the camp and the Italians are informed he was killed by a roof fall.

Sadistic Capitano Benucci (Peter Arne) charges Captain Roger Byfold (Donald Houston) with the murder of the Greek. The escape committee form a plan to get Byfold and two other officers (played by Peter Jones and Michael Wilding) out of the camp before he can be shot. The three scale the camp fence with a ladder constructed from two Rugby posts, but Benucci is waiting and shoots them.

The race is then on to find the informer and for the rest of the inmates to escape en masse before the camp is handed over to the Germans as part of the Italian Armistice. The escape plan devised by Lieutenant Colonel Huxley (Bernard Lee) is for the prisoners to make their escape during the day, under cover of a production of Hamlet in the theatre hut by a group of POWs led by Captain Rupert Callender (Dennis Price).