THE GREAT ESCAPE Movie Review

1963 John Sturges

The French auteur theory of criticism holds that the director is responsible for all that is right or wrong in a film. That, of course, is a grotesque oversimplification, never more obviously so than with this crowd-pleaser. Stalmaster-Lister Co., which gets credit for the casting, made a huge contribution, along with Fernando Carrere and Kip Ripberger, who created the sets. So did Bert Hendrikson who designed the wardrobe, Elmer Bernstein for the score and . . . but why go on? Filmmaking is a collective art and in this case, the collaborative chemistry is close to perfect.

A foreword states: “This is a true story—although the characters are composites of real men, and time and place have been compressed—every detail of the escape is the way it really happened.” Though the actual events are forced into the formula of a conventional adventure film, the key points are true enough, particularly when compared to the usual Hollywood version of history. Reportedly, writer Paul Brickhill refused to sell the film rights to his book until he was assured that the proper care would be taken with the story of a mass 1944 escape by officers from a German prison camp. Perhaps because producer-writer James Clavell had been a prisoner of war himself, he made sure that the material received that respect. (Clavell's experiences are the basis for the novel and film King Rat. )

As everyone knows, however, fealty to historical truth is no guarantee of boxoffice success. The right casting is much more important, and the filmmakers got it right by creating an ensemble of older, established British character actors and young Americans on the brink of stardom. Though they are familiar names now, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, James Garner, David McCallum, and Steve McQueen were less well known in 1963. (McQueen, Coburn, and Bronson had worked for director John Sturges a few years before in The Magnificent Seven.) They have most of the flashy scenes; their British counterparts—Richard Attenborough, James Donald, Donald Pleasence, Gordon Jackson, Angus Lennie, and Nigel Stock—do most of the dramatic heavy lifting, with assistance from Hannes Messemer as the sympathetic commandant and Hans Reiser as a fussy Gestapo officer.

The simple sets recreating a rough-hewn POW compound in the middle of a pine forest are initially forbidding. As the film progresses, the place comes to look more like a summer camp for grown-ups with arts and crafts classes in forgery, tunneling, and burglary.

Sturges is careful with the pace in the first half, letting the escape plans develop slowly and leavening the situation with a solid sense of humor. The characters are unusually well developed, and though the action is fairly evenly divided among the ensemble, one member stands out.

This is the role that made Steve McQueen a star, despite the fact that he hardly appears in the first half of the film. He's introduced with the rest at the beginning, then disappears for 40 minutes. After returning briefly, he disappears again until the midpoint. Those scenes have relatively little to do with the rest of the action, so most viewers don't notice how maniacally McQueen mugs his way through them. He comes into his own in the third act when he gets on the motorcycle. That image of a regular guy in a cut-off sweatshirt and khakis outrunning (almost) the whole German army is one of the defining moments of 1960s cinema. In that long scene, combined with the conclusion which leaves him unrepentant and still defiant, McQueen defined himself as the anti-establishment hero for a generation.

Cast: Steve McQueen (Capt. Virgil Hilts, “The Cooler King”), James Garner (Hendley, “The Scrounger”), Richard Attenborough (Bartlett, “Big X”), Charles Bronson (Danny Velinski, “Tunnel King”), James Coburn (Sedgwick, “Manufacturer”), Donald Pleasence (Colin Blythe, “The Forger”), David McCallum (Ashley-Pitt, “Dispersal”), James Donald (Senior Officer Ramsey), Gordon Jackson (MacDonald, “Intelligence”), Hannes Messemer (Kommandant Von Luger), John Leyton (Willie, “Tunnel King”), Nigel Stock (Cavendish, “The Surveyor”), Jud Taylor (Goff), Hans Reiser (Kuhn), Robert Freitag (Posen), Karl Otto Alberty (Steinach), Angus Lennie (Ives, “The Mole”), Robert Graf (Werner, “The Ferret”), Harry Riebauer (Strachwitz); Written by: James Clavell, W.R. Burnett; Cinematography by: Daniel F. Fapp; Music by: Elmer Bernstein. Producer: James Clavell, John Sturges, United Artists. Awards: Nominations: Academy Awards '63: Best Film Editing. Budget: 4M. Running Time: 170 minutes. Format: VHS, Beta, LV, Letterbox, Closed Caption, DVD.