**** (out of ****)
Starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, James Donald, Donald Pleasence, James Coburn, Gordon Jackson, Angus Lennie, Hannes Messmer, John Leyton, and Charles Bronson
Directed by John Sturges & written for the screen by James Clavell and W.R. Burnett, from the book by Paul Brickhill
1963
172 min PG
It should come as no surprise that, when asked by “Sight & Sound” to name the ten best movies of all time, pop-culture sponge Quentin Tarantino picked “The Great Escape.” It is the post-war studio system at its finest, filled with so much that true cinephiles love to see in older movies. I don’t want to say clichés, but…think of it this way: I saw “The Great Escape” recently on the big screen, a beat-up print, grainy and swimming, and I loved every second of it. It is a Movie, in the truest sense of the word.
Like “The Ten Commandments” and “Ben-Hur,” “The Great Escape” was originally intended to play straight and we feel its emotions sincerely. But we also LOVE the campiness, the cheese. We love loathsome movie Nazis who spit out every syllable like an insult, scowl ceaselessly, and then get blown away in sidewalk cafés by wine-guzzling French Resistance fighters. We love recognizing the Gestapo guy because he’s wearing a leather trenchcoat. We love characters that talk to themselves for our convenience and any movie that has the palm-forward British salute can’t be all bad. There are about a half-dozen things spelled out that should have been left for us to decipher, and fans of spotting unintentional or subliminal homo-eroticism in old movies will not go away disappointed. The score by Elmer Bernstein is one of the most infectious and hum-able and the cast includes three of the Magnificent Seven. And if you want to, you can probably cite “The Great Escape” for all sorts of old Hollywood flaws, for not representing minority characters, for painting a too-rosy picture of World War II, for altering history, and things that like that. But “The Great Escape” works in the most simple, fundamental way a movie can: there is a wide array of sympathetic characters and we can’t wait to know what happens to them next.
Also, if you saw “The Great Escape” as an eight-year-old boy it was probably the best movie you’d ever seen. There’s a secret escape organization, secret signals and door knocks, and boundless ingenuity when it comes to tunneling. The Nazis are the repressive forces of authority—parents and teachers—and for the most part the punishment they mete out come across like a D-hall or a call home. The Allied officers in the prison camp never pull rank because they’re more like a class of boys than military men; “The Great Escape” is perhaps spiritually as close to “The Breakfast Club” as it is to “Saving Private Ryan.” The boys work on their tunnels through the night with the kind of myopic determination of children who really have something on the brain. One is reminded of the final act of “Huckleberry Finn” in which Tom and Huck are delighted by the prospect of spending the rest of their lives digging Jim out of his imprisonment, even passing the task onto their children. Even when Our Heroes meet their various ends—some good, some bad, some terrible—yes, it is effective, but it’s almost like being eliminated in a game of dodgeball. And not only is there no romantic subplot in “The Great Escape”—the worst thing a boy need tolerate in a movie—there is not even a single speaking part for any woman in the whole film. It is a movie beloved by dads and uncles and teenage boys everywhere.
If 172 minutes seems a trifle much to spend on prisoners, when we could be watching people blow stuff up elsewhere, think of a POW camp as the ultimate existential crisis. All the prisoners’ needs are provided for, yet their identity is at stake if they sit back and do nothing. All officers have a sworn duty to escape or harass the enemy as much as possible, the movie claims. (I believe “The Great Escape’s” assertion that there is such an oath, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t really exist.) We should remember an Allied soldier captured in late 1939 has about five years of imprisonment ahead of him, worse than a normal convict’s time because the soldier has no contact with the outside world and no idea how much longer the fighting might last.
The set-up is classic: the Luftwaffe decides to put all the worst Allied prisoners into one super-camp. These are mostly British pilots that were shot down two, even three years earlier. But the Germans have goofed: now all the best minds at escaping are able to pool their collective resources, and the Allied prisoners hatch a plan to dig three tunnels simultaneously and free 250 men in a single evening. Leading the escape attempt is a RAF captain (Sir Richard Attenborough) who the SS threatens odiously “if you try to escape again, you vill be shot!”
Watching the movie again recently I thought it began a little slow, what with the cute introductions to all the characters, but then the ingenuity of its escape artists brought out the eight-year-old in me with a vengeance. The prisoners develop a complicated system of signals to let each other know when the “goons” are nowhere to be seen. They dig inside their huts in time with the digging they are permitted to do outside. They rig hidden pockets to sneak dirt into their new gardens. They raid the walls, bedposts, and furniture for every last bit of wood to shore up their tunnels. They employ an aerial reconnaissance photographer to forge documents. A tailor-turned-pilot is able to cut uniforms into civilian clothes and the POWs take up German. The ingenuous transformation of one object into another fascinates me to no end and I was putty in the movie’s hands.
Steve McQueen’s slack-jawed, alternately clever and alternately dopey American pilot is billed first. He mouths off to the Kommandant (Hannes Messemer) and thrills us with several motorcycle escapades that are all the more dramatically exciting when we think of how narratively useless they are. Great images are established of him on a bike, fleeing from waves and waves of stupid-helmeted Nazis, and we think because the shots are long it’s a stunt double, but then he roars up close to the camera and we realize, yes, it’s McQueen doing his own riding. Then we recognize why in “The Tao of Steve” McQueen is held up as the ultimate example of American manhood. When he revs up that motorcycle and circles and gets a running start and jumps that barbed wire fence, God help me every drop of testosterone in my body cheered. He gets D-halls most of all and defiantly, American-ly bounces his baseball off the wall of his cell in solitary confinement.
Page two of "The Great Escape" (1963). Back to home.