Ah, the old people, the movies love the old people, always off on one of their wacky adventures, those reckless and crazy one-last-hurrah-before-they-die jaunts.

Here’s another one, Bernard Jordan (Caine),  a 90-year-old WWII veteran, who sparks a police manhunt when he escapes from his Hove care home to attend the 70th anniversary of D-Day.

Except to its great credit, Parker’s based-on-a-true story film isn’t a twee British movie about the elderly which are too often motivated by our inability to face up to the prospect of ageing.

This is the reality of getting old. It isn’t pretty but there is dignity to it.

What is striking is that almost nothing happens. For a start Jordan doesn’t do anything is dramatic as escape; he tells his wife Irene (Jackson) where he’s going, and she keeps quiet long enough for him to catch the ferry to France.

Ham & High: Glenda Jackson who died earlier this year plays the wife of a D Day Veteran who flees his care home to attend the 70th anniversary in NormandyGlenda Jackson who died earlier this year plays the wife of a D Day Veteran who flees his care home to attend the 70th anniversary in Normandy (Image: Pathe)Once in Normandy he doesn’t get into any scrapes. There’s a lot of alcohol drunk but the tone is mostly sombre. He meets up with another veteran played by John Standing, and has some interactions with American and German soldiers, plus a younger veteran of Helmand.

Through a series of (shoestring but effective) flashbacks to events around the 1944 landings, we learn why the trip is significant to him. When he gets back, he is irritated to find out that it has been blown up into an And Finally... story by the local and national press.

Nothing much happening is generally viewed to be a negative but in this, it is the crux of the film’s meaning. The real adventure is being happily married to the same person for seven decades. There’s something admirably perverse about a film, whose main theme is that its story isn’t one worth telling.

Michael Caine is excellent, and this is Glenda Jackson’s last film. The two-time Oscar winner died in June, aged 87, and such a steely subversion of patronising feelgood fantasies about the elderly feels like an appropriate note for her to go out on.Ham & High: Michael Caine is excellent as the D Day veteran who visits Normandy but the film focuses on his seven decade marriage to Jackson's character.Michael Caine is excellent as the D Day veteran who visits Normandy but the film focuses on his seven decade marriage to Jackson's character. (Image: Pathe)

After 18 years as MP for Hampstead and Highgate/ Kilburn, she navigated her move back from politics to acting, concentrating more on the stage than the screen, with more success than Schwarzenegger. Whatever you felt about her as an MP there was something rather endearing about a thespian being the politician least capable of summoning a convincing fake smile.

The Great Escaper. (12A) Directed by Oliver Parker. Starring Michael Caine, Glenda Jackson, John Standing, Danielle Vitalis and Will Fletcher. In cinemas on Friday, October 6. Running time: 96 mins.

Go to half-man-half-critic.weebly.com for reviews of Eureka's 4k UHD Blu-ray of Orson Welles Touch of Evil, and the BFI Blu-ray of Peter Bogdanovich's stunning debut, Targets.