The Great Escape (1963)

Director: John Sturges                                 Writer: James Clavell & W.R. Burnett
Film Score: Elmer Bernstein                         Cinematography: Daniel L. Fapp
Starring: Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough and Charles Bronson

There were a lot of big-budget, epic films from the fifties and early sixties that fail to be artistically relevant today. In fact, nineteen fifty-five through sixty-five was the last real decade of the epic film and The Great Escape might even be considered the last great epic in film history. It has everything, suspense, excitement, danger as well as a healthy dose of humor. It has an all-star cast, a brilliant screenplay, a first-class director and an exhilarating film score. The film is almost three hours long and feels like only half of that. It’s based on a true story from World War II about a mass escape attempt in 1944 from a German prisoner of war camp that held mostly British and Commonwealth officers. The book was written by one of the officers, Paul Brickhill, and was a huge best seller at the time.

The film opens on a new prisoner of war camp that the Germans have built especially for their problem prisoners, the ones in other camps who keep attempting to escape. Both Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson had come over with director John Sturges from filming The Magnificent Seven a few years earlier, while James Garner had just finished his six-year run on the television show Maverick. The other American, playing an Australian, was James Coburn, who had been doing mostly television at this time. The great British actors include Richard Attenborough, Donald Pleasence, David McCallum, Gordon Jackson and, most importantly, James Donald who had made such a strong impression in the other great war epic of the era, The Bridge on the River Kwai from 1957. The supporting cast, too numerous to mention, were very well chosen and help make this one of the great films of all time.

The head of the escape committee is Attenborough, who decides that as long as they have all of these skilled men in the camp he might as well use them and immediately decides to dig three tunnels instead of one, attempting to get as many as two hundred and fifty men out. At the same time McQueen and Angus Lennie are doing everything they can to break out on their own. Just before the big breakout, the officers in charge ask McQueen to go out once more and get captured so he can bring back information about what the surrounding area is like. It’s an device that would be repeated in the John Huston POW film Victory in 1981. Ultimately there are some problems with the breakout and only seventy six men wind up escaping. McQueen is great on a twenty-year old motorcycle. Garner flies out in a plane with Pleasence, Coburn rides a bike into France, and Bronson takes to the water in a boat. Though few of the men actually escape, some do, and it winds up being a very uplifting story despite the downbeat ending.

The film was completely snubbed at Oscar time, earning only a single nomination for film editing, which is a shame. Of the other films that were nominated that year none of them have matched the sustained popularity and the artistic recognition that The Great Escape has acquired over the years. John Sturges was a great director with a flair for action, going on to film John Wayne in McQ and helming another World War II classic, The Eagle has Landed, before retiring. Future seventies novelist James Clavell and former thirties crime writer W.R. Burnett did a terrific job on the script, infusing it with plenty of humor to leaven the suspense. The film score by Elmer Bernstein is regarded as a classic in its own right, instantly recognizable and obviously inspired. With the stellar acting talent and the solid supporting crew, The Great Escape has remained a favorite among fans of war films, and is among my favorite films of any genre.