#196: The Great Escape
Release Date: July 4th, 1963
Format: Criterion Collection on Blu-ray
Written by: W.R. Burnett and James Clavell
Directed by: John Sturges
4 Stars
There are criticisms that could be weighed on The Great Escape, and valid criticisms at that. Directed by John Sturges, the story concerns an Allied POW camp in Nazi Germany and the prisoners’ collected effort to dig a massive tunnel to free the camp’s entire population of captured soldiers.
Because it was the early ‘60s - largely before the rise of popular Vietnam-era counterculture - and because it was a Hollywood production, The Great Escape presents a simplistic worldview:
Germans are neurotic, fascist automatons.
Brits are plucky, clever little buggers.
Americans are handsome, swaggering badasses.
And Canadians, who largely participated in the real life prison escape on which the movie is based, don’t exist. There are no Canadians in The Great Escape, following a rich Hollywood tradition of ignoring the country entirely.
The script, from W.R. Burnett and James Clavell, also ignores the Holocaust, both narratively and tonally. This is a story of bravery, of brotherhood, and of anti-fascism, I suppose, but only to a point. I think Hollywood read the story of a real-life prisoner escape in Nazi Germany and thought, “Hey, I bet we could sell this as an adventure tale. But let’s write out the Canadians and put in more Americans.” It was probably that simple.
To capture this adventure is the camera of John Sturges, who chooses to stay out of the way. Interior scenes are captured in simple, front lit medium shots - similarly to TV shows of that time - usually with a static camera. Exteriors filming is also unpretentious; Sturges uses crane and tracking shots sparingly.
On this most recent viewing of The Great Escape, it struck me that this seems to be a transitional movie:
The story is not pro-American propaganda in the way John Wayne WWII movies were in the ‘40s, but it is naive in comparison to the great Vietnam war movies that would come out in the ‘70s.
Also transitional is Sturges’ visual storytelling, in which he serves as a bridge between old Hollywood and new, still using conservative photography, but attempting a degree of realism with British and German actors and shooting on location in Bavaria for weeks (not that Sturges wanted to; he wanted to film in Los Angeles and his producers had to fly to Bavaria to take photos and confront him with the fact that southern California and southern Germany look nothing alike).
Steve McQueen’s character, Captain Hilts, serves as an anti-hero prototype before they became all the rage later in the decade. Hilts is brash and stubborn, sure, but unassailably moral. This archetype would evolve and darken as the 1960s and Vietnam wore on.
But the thing with The Great Escape is that it’s these transitional qualities that make the movie so special.
It’s a perfect snap shot.
In 1963, Hollywood was in transition. America was in transition.
And The Great Escape perfectly captures these shifting attitudes with its bold iconography. Featuring several exciting action set pieces and chock full of young movie stars (the aforementioned McQueen, but also James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Donald Pleasence, James Coburn, and a cool as hell Charles Bronson), the movie is a last gasp of innocent American adventurism. These are young men on a mission to defeat bad guys, and they’ll do it to a rousing Elmer Bernstein score full of snare drums and trumpets.
It’s 1963, so enjoy it while it lasts. Dark times are on the way.
