The McKenzie Break (also known as Escape) is a 1970 British war drama film directed by Lamont Johnson and starring Brian Keith, Helmut Griem, Ian Hendry and Jack Watson.

Captain Jack Connor, seconded from the Royal Ulster Rifles to British Army Intelligence, a crime reporter during peacetime, is in hot water (again) for various off-duty indiscretions.

The delirious Neuchl keeps repeating the phrase "twenty-eight submariners", but before he can be questioned a phony riot is staged as cover for strangling him, faked as suicide.

The plot of the film loosely reflects real-life events at POW camp in Ontario, Canada; in particular, the interception of German attempts to communicate in code with the captured U-boat ace Otto Kretschmer, and the "trial" of Captain Hans-Joachim Rahmlow and his second-in-command, Bernhard Berndt from U-570, which was surrendered in September 1941, and recommissioned as HMS Graph.

Kretschmer was also the subject of Operation Kiebitz, an attempt to liberate several U-boat commanders from Bowmanville by submarine, which was foiled by the Royal Canadian Navy.

Film rights were bought in January 1968, prior to the novel's publication, by the producing team of Jules Gardner, Arthur Levy and Arnold Laven, who ran LGL Productions and had a deal with United Artists.

Above all, the various character clashes in the film (Perry-Connor, Connor-Schluetter, Schluetter-Neuchl) are quietly, credibly and observantly built up to sidestep their melodramatic possibilities, with excellent performances all round.

Perhaps the script might have dug more incisively into the U-Boat/Luftwaffe split, with its hints of anti-Semitism and homosexual-baiting; and perhaps tighter editing might have avoided some of the sagging moments; but on the whole this is what might once have been described as an unusually intelligent B-feature, in which even the Irish locations manage to stand in for a credible Scotland.