Of course McQueen and Attenborough are supported by a wide and sympathetic array of sharply drawn characters. The great James Garner, who is one of most effortless and naturalistic actors to ever draw breath, is the camp’s “scrounger,” able to locate tools and equipment you wouldn’t think could be smuggled into a POW camp, sometimes through ingenuity and sometimes by smooth-talking the guards. His bunkmate is the mousy forger played by Donald Pleasence, who seems to have modeled his performance on Winnie-the-Pooh. James Coburn is a rough-tongued Australian tunneler, Gordon Jackson is Attenborough’s right-hand, and Angus Lennie is a Scottish jockey-turned-pilot who gets chummy with McQueen when they try escaping on the same day. Charles Bronson is the chief architect of the tunnel and just happens to suffer from claustrophobia. It is only through the encouragement of John Leyton’s pilot that he is able to escape at all. What do I mean by encouragement? Well, do you remember that unintentional homo-eroticism I mentioned earlier? But I’m confident that that’s only my overactive dirty mind; within most groups of boys there’s usually some pairing off, some declaration of a best-est buddy-hood. In “The Great Escape” it’s Attenborough with Jackson, McQueen with Lennie, Bronson with Leyton, Pleasence with Garner, etc.
(Reading this aloud to my wife, she keeps saying “That was James Garner? The RAF captain was the old guy from ‘Jurassic Park?’ I recognize them when they’re older…”)
As for the bad guys: “Zis is not a matter for levity!” But, then again, when you’re a movie Nazi, nothing is a matter for levity, except perhaps the pain and suffering of your helpless enemies or the desecration of their flags. The Gestapo of “The Great Escape” are so hate-filled that they can even make the closing of briefcase contemptuous. And if you want to shake your fist at the screen when some nasty little Hitler youth wanders on, go right ahead. You can tell the prison camp Kommandant isn’t such a bad guy because his “heil Hitler” is without feeling and draws worried stares from those swine in the SS. “The Great Escape” does skip some clichés from which it may have benefited; the Nazis, for instance, do not hold their cigarettes between their pinkies and ring fingers, which everyone knows is how movie Nazis ought to smoke.
But “The Great Escape” does let people talk to themselves when there’s no one else around and we might not be smart enough to figure out what they’re doing. The forger does get to mutter “I can’t see a thing!” in case we didn’t catch on to all the out-of-focus shots and McQueen declares hungrily “Switzerland!” as he spots the Alps and revs his engine. Still, the occasions when “The Great Escape” beats us over the head are counteracted by subtler moments; no discussion is made of why the cane-carrying and limping Allied commander does not join those escaping. But maybe it must be impossible for him to join the boys in their escape. He’s too much of a grown-up that just happens to be on the boys’ side. He’s only an honorary boy, like an older brother or a young uncle or a cool teacher; he can guide them but not join them. The commander is played by James Donald, you know, the “Madness! Madness!” doctor from “Bridge on the River Kwai.”
“The Great Escape” is the clean and straightforward work of director-producer John Sturges, who helmed many of the big Cinemascope epics of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Modern audiences might find them just a leeeeetle bit on the slow side, and they include “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Hallelujah Trail.” The surprisingly brutal Michael Caine/Donald Sutherland/Robert Duvall thriller “The Eagle Has Landed” (1977) is among his final pictures, and is one of my favorite “Nazis-with-British-accents” flicks. Based on a true story, the screenplay for “The Great Escape” is largely written by novelist James Clavell, who wrote “Shogun,” “Taipan,” and “Noble House.” The escape, when it finally happens after several false starts, is timed perfectly, with air raid signals, roving strobe lights, and it’s amazing how much suspense is drawn from men running across twenty of feet of grass in the dark. The exploits of the men on the loose are equally suspenseful as they ride trains next to soldiers and try to fool the SS with their German and their forged documents.
(There was a television miniseries in the late 1980s called “The Great Escape II: The Untold Story,” starring Christopher Reeve, Judd Hirsch, and Ian McShane, and it’s a fine way to spend four hours-minus-commercial breaks. Rather than simply tell the same story all over again, it is equally devoted to the escape and to the capture of war criminals involved with the execution of prisoners. “The Great Escape II” is also a good example of how a modern movie that sticks to historical facts is usually not as much fun as an older movie that doesn’t mind cutting corners. As for some quality parodying of “The Great Escape,” check out “The Simpsons’” episode where Maggie is locked up in a daycare center, and the entirety of the film “Chicken Run.”)
It’s hard to call “The Great Escape” an important or a groundbreaking movie. “Bridge on the River Kwai” in many ways tells the same story in a deeper, more sophisticated manner. “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Lawrence of Arabia” were both released the previous year and have not dated as much, and “Dr. Strangelove” was to turn heads the following year, as it still turns heads. Godard and Truffaut had already kicked off the French New Wave and Fellini had already made “La Dolce Vita.” Across the other ocean Ozu and Kurosawa were equally hard at work, one shooting carefully-documented everyday life and the other shooting arrows through people’s necks. But “The Great Escape” is a great movie because it is a style of moviemaking at its best. It is the finest example of an idea or an image we once had of World War II that we have decided might not be so accurate anymore. And it is enormously entertaining.
Finished July 11th, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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