Where to find help to identify this WWII film?

What newsgroup would best help me identitfy this WWII film?

I apologize for my memory of it being vague and spotty, but I remember it being an awesome chase movie (to a 12 year old) of 2 or 3 guys running from the Germans to the safety of Switzerland. They suffer many trials and tribulations, jumping on train roofs and all other sorts of conveyences. At the end of the movie, with German troops are hot on their trail, they are on foot and think Switzerland is just beyond a high and treacherous mountian pass. The 'Germans' eventually catch up to them before they reach the pass, but it is only then that we find out that they weren't Germans, but allies, telling them they have been within Swiss borders for the past 2 weeks. The movie may or may not be in Black and White (but I think it is). Does this sound at all familiar to anyone, or does anyone know of a good place to post this question?

'Von Ryan's Express' starring Frank Sinatra as Colonel Joseph Ryan.

Also starring Trevor Howard and James Brolin, among others.

Cheers and all,

This sounds familiar to me, but I remember that the sentence of the Swiss guard was (more or less) 'you are in Switzerland since two kilometres' (not two weeks).

Unfortunately I don't remember anything more about the movie. But maybe this might awake someone else's memory.

It is not 'Von Ryan's Express' they are still in Italy at the end of that movie...

Den of Earth

This sounds to me like the motion picture 'The Sound of Music', which was the story of the escape of the von Trapp family from Austria after the outbreak of World War II. I have a vague recollection that there was a scene somewhat like that in the movie.

Anybody?

This sounds somewhat like one of the threads in _The Great Escape_. Two of the characters, Flight Lt. Colin 'The Forger' Blythe (Donald Pleasence) and Flight Lt. Bob Anthony 'The Scrounger' Hendley (James Garner), having got out of the camp, reach a German airfield. They steal a plane and fly toward Switzerland.

The plane crashes, but they survive, and scramble over the mountains for a while. Exhausted and near despair, they suddenly encounter a uniformed man with a rifle. But he's not a German, he's a Swiss border guard, who tells them they are well inside

_The Great Escape_ must have changed a lot since the last time I saw it. In every viewing I can recall, the plane carrying Pleasence and Garner crashes short of the Swiss frontier. Pleasence, who is by this point in the story almost blind, stumbles wildly from the crash site into the path of advancing German troops, who shoot him dead. Garner is bundled back to the prison camp.

Its story does not *quite* fit with your description, but I suspect you may be recalling Jean Renoir's classic _Grand Illusion_ (1937), which - as the date would suggest - is set in the First, not the Second World War.

IMPROVED VERSION

I saw the under subject mentioned question posted and expected, that a simple answer would come up within a few days.

I have up to now seen a lot of suggestions. However none of them fitting the posted description of the movie.

Being of perhaps some older age and living in Wester Europe, I remember having seen the following - black and white - move in 1946:

The Last Chance, in other languages La derniere chance or Die letzte Chance, Switserland, 1945, maybe in co-production with French and/or Italian moviemakers. Director: Leopold Lindtberg.

The plot concerns a party of an American officer and a British officer and NCO escaping from a German PoW-train in Northern Italy and joining a rather large group of multi-national refugees (among them some Jews), on the run for the Gestapo and the Sicherheitspolizei. Setting out for the Swiss border, they start their journey in an Italian mountain-village - the parish priest, a member of the resistance, is later on murdered by the Nazis - and climb all the way up to a pass in the Italian Alps, the frontier with Switserland. Tracked and harassed by a German border-(ski-)patrol, in pursuit of the long stretched column of climbers, they loose several members of their party. On reaching the Swiss border a professor of philosophy has lost the large suitcase containing the manuscript of his lifelong achievement, a major opus on the history of philosophy, and hundreds of white sheets of paper are blown out of the then broken suitcase over the glacierlike mountainpass. When the survivors of the party meet the Swiss border-guards, the professor, in his old age, remarks: 'I am sure there are libraries in Switserland too. I am going to start anew writing my book!'.

Could the above described plot hold the answer to the question?

Otherwise: please elaborate somewhat more and I will again go to the depths of my memory to dig up something more.