#277: The Great Escape
The classic POW movie to end all POW movies
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 19, 2020.
Initial release: June 20, 1963
Director: John Sturges
What’s the most famous World War II movie? The one everyone (at least in the west) knows about? It’s a tough question, as there are so many to choose from across a full 85 years since the war started. But perhaps John Sturges’ three-hour epic, The Great Escape, might have some standing for the title, at least among audiences of a certain age.
It’s 1943 (probably) and a newly built prison camp for Allied air force officers, operated by the Luftwaffe, has just received a load of new prisoners. Many of these men are seasoned escape artists; this new prison was intended to help keep an eye on all of them at once. The prisoners are a motley crew, mostly British or Scottish, one Australian, one Polish, and three American. It soon becomes clear that of course they intend to make an escape, and under the leadership of RAF squadron leader Roger Bartlett, they embark on an audacious plan: build three tunnels from under the cabins out past the wire and beyond the treeline, and use them to ferry as many as three hundred prisoners out under the very noses of the Nazis. It’d be one of the biggest escape attempts in the whole war.
What follows is one of the greatest prisoner-of-war dramas ever made. There are multiple threads and storylines following this multitude of characters; in some ways it feels episodic, as the digging project wears on for a number of months. In a way, it’s kind of like a heist film, with an enormous number of characters, each with their own job to do, each contributing to a massive, carefully measured plan that’s audacious as it is cunning — only in this case, it’s breaking out of a place, not into one. It’s not until the final third of the film that its episodic nature gives way to a more straightforward film as the various threads, while not quite all coming together, are weaved in such a way that these disparate stories all seem to form a cohesive whole.
Like many 60s films, the cinematography generally won’t wow you for most of the film, though towards the end we’re treated to some great scenes with Steve McQueen on a motorcycle (one of the most famous stunts ever done in film.) What’s more important is the character drama. With so many big names in the cast — Richard Attenborough, James Garner, Charles Bronson, among others — you can expect some all-star performances, and you certainly get them in this film. Donald Pleasence’s slowly-going-blind Blythe is perhaps the most tragic character, masterfully done by Pleasance.
The film doesn’t really feel three hours long, though it certainly feels split in two right at the halfway mark, when the first tunnel is discovered and a character commits suicide by guard, at which point McQueen’s previously-aloof character is fully on board with the operation. Elmer Bernstein’s score is iconic, but it’s also quite creative, eschewing a lot of the more traditional trappings of war-movie scores for something a little more original while still remaining well within traditionalism. It might be one of the best film scores of the era.
It’s hard to really quantify what makes this film so special. Perhaps it’s that air of defiance, so relatively soon after the war, that rings true with people; whatever it is, it keeps the film going through a major shift in tone as the film ends with most of the escaped prisoners being hunted down and shot.
There’s a lot of “famous” World War II movies out there, but how many have the kind of cultural cachet that this one does? Hell, it even had a whole plot reference on The Simpsons once, music included. So whatever the technical merits of this film, this is a splendidly acted thriller that managed to weave all these characters together in a way that doesn’t overwhelm or leave the audience cold, and also redefined how we thought of World War II movies.
