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A generation
of schoolchildren learned how to speak German from this film. You simply
speak English, but with a German accent, and it works.
If I was really sad, and I am, but if I was even sadder than that, I'd
find out exactly how many times it has been shown on terrestrial UK television,
to see if it actually had been repeated an unusually high amount of times,
or whether that's just an urban legend.
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I was shocked and stunned to learn that Charles Bronson
was once actually young. As a child of the 80s I only knew him from the
Death Wish films
(the later ones, in particular).
I imagine that people who are younger than me are amazed, when watching
The Terminator, to see that Lance Henriksen was also young once.
I was similarly surprised, when watching The Eyes of Laura Mars,
to see that Tommy Lee Jones was not always in his mid-fities.
On the right, Steve McQueen couldn't do this shot - he did most of the
others - because the film's insurance company wouldn't let him. So they
got somebody whose life was worth less to do it instead. They probably
used things like that for propaganda purposes in the Soviet Union.
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1. Like The Dirty Dozen and The Magnificent Seven,
The Great Escape has an almost exclusively-male cast, and is an
ensemble movie of a kind that is no longer financially possible due to
the sharp rise in star salaries during the 80s. To make such a film nowadays
producers would need to cast a group of young, up-and-coming (and cheap)
twenty-somethings. Which would actually be more historically accurate
than The Great Escape, in which the cast are all in their thirties
or forties.
That said, you don't get actors like the actors in The Great Escape
any more. Except for the occasional Tommy Lee Jones or Samuel Jackson,
modern film stars tend to be younger and wimpier than James Garner or
Charles Bronson.
Bet-winning piece of trivia: although all three of the aforementioned
films feature similar casts, Charles Bronson is the only actor to star
in all of them.
1. There was a clever and quite good computer game based on the
film in the mid-80s, from Ocean software, on a variety of 8-bit platforms.
It's forgotten nowadays, which is a shame, as, along with Mercenary,
it's one of the earliest 'non-linear' adventures, in that there were several
different ways to finish the game (none of which I managed - it was very
hard).
6. The DVD has a short documentary about the reality that the film
is loosely based on. It's 24 minutes long, and was thus made for American
television some time ago - nowadays, American television half-hours have
shrunk to 22 minutes in order to fit in more adverts. Presumably The
Great Escape, with its nigh-on three hour running time, takes up three
and three-quarter hours, and is thus shown over two nights or not at all.
Director John Sturges previously did Bad Day at Black Rock, the
anti-Great Escape, in that it has a single star name and finishes
in half the time.
The documentary is narrated by Miguel Ferrer, a man who will live forever
due to his role in Robocop, as the ill-fated Bob Morton, inventor
of Robocop and eventual hand-grenade victim.
1b. The upper half of David McCallum's head has aged a lot less
than the lower half. The lower half of his face resembles that of Bob
Hope.
3. It cost four million dollars to make.
That's about 30 million dollars today, but you can't make a direct comparison
because film costs have increased above the rate of inflation.
3b. By dint of quality and epic length, The Great Escape
was the last word in WW2 escape films (the previous benchmark being Stalag
17, although The One that Got Away, a POW film from the point
of view of a German aviator escaping from the UK, was quite well-received
too). Familiar from early-afternoon Bank Holiday television screenings,
the film went on to provide inspiration for an episode of Michael Palin's
Ripping Yarns, as well as large chunks of Paul Merton's mid-90s
television series.
The few escape movies that followed - Papillon and Escape from
Alcatraz being the two most famous - tended to shift the focus away
from WW2 which, by the late-60s, was becoming an overfamiliar war. Two
exceptions were 1979's Escape to Athena and 1981's Escape to
Victory. The former was by ITC and, in common with all ITC films,
had a large cast of slumming stars, was set in Europe, and was drab, outdated,
and uninteresting in a way that only ITC films - such as The Cassandra
Crossing, Raise the Titanic, Firepower, Hawk the
Slayer, The Eagle Has Landed - could manage. Escape to Victory
was unbelievably silly, and featured a cast of footballing POWs (including
Sylvester Stallone and Pele - together at last! - and Michael Caine during
his lengthy 'I'm just paying for extensions to my house' phase) who were
made to play a football match against a German team, for propaganda reasons.
My thoughts on Escape to Victory:
1. The live radio commentary of the climactic football match was conducted
by a Nazi broadcaster, and was largely fictional. Although the Allies
won the match, and the Germans cheated, the commentator lied constantly
to cover it up. As the radio microphone seemed to be the only link with
the outside world, why did the have the actual match at all? Why didn't
they just have the commentary on its own? Like in that Philip K Dick story
with the robot newspaper that printed fictional stories which were
so convincing that people assumed that they were real? It might have made
sense if the match had been broadcast as part of a gigantic Olympic telecast,
but there only seemed to be a few hundred spectators and the microphone.
2. Pele was an is a famous footballer. How did this happen? Since when
did British television broadcast Brazilian football matches? There's the
World Cup, but that only happens once every four years. Did he have a
television series? Or something? How come people all over the world knew
him? At least the Harlem Globetrotters had a cartoon series. I don't understand.
3. Was the film part of a Government effort to publicise football in the
US? It was an American film, and presumably the producers had to persuade
investors that Americans wanted to see a war / sport / escape film featuring
a foreign sport, instead of, say, the then-forthcoming The Empire Strikes
Back. The Olympic Games - which were boycotted by the US, as President
Jimmy Carter obviously believed that doing so would force the Soviets
to stop invading Afghanistan - happened the year before.
4. The bit where the resistance dig through the team's bath, and the water
gushes away, was really cool.
5. The music was good.
-
I can't think of a single mainstream Hollywood escape film since Escape
to Victory, except for maybe The Shawshank
Redemption. And The Rock, although in that film
Sean Connery actually un-escapes. Unless you count Natural Born
Killers, perhaps, or something like Cube or Dark City.
Second World War films went into Western-style hibernation during the
80s and 90s, as directors and audiences shifted attention to the Vietnam
war and commando actions in nameless Latin American dictatorships (with
the exception of Das Boot, the semi-WW2 Indiana Jones films
and the dismal 1992 Michael Douglas / Melanie Griffith film Shining
Through (and The Rocketeer (and Captain America, but
this is getting silly))), until Stephen Speilberg stepped in and revived
the genre with Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan,
the latter coinciding with Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line.
U-571 was more indicative of a revival as, unlike the aforementioned
films, it wasn't arty or an 'event movie' in any way, it was just a standard
Hollywood action film.
As I write this, Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Pearl Harbour
are on the verge of release, after which, presumably, World War 2 will
be cast into the oblivion of World War One and all previous wars. The
Straight Story will probably be the last film to utilise WW2 in a
contemporary context - there simply aren't any Hollywood actors old enough
to portray war veterans.
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There was a computer magazine in the mid-80s called 'Big
K'. I don't know why. Probably something to do with KB.
Why is
the man on the left familiar? Where else
has he played a German officer? Raiders of the Lost Ark? Where
Eagles Dare?
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7. David McCallum
plays a character called Ashley! Ashley-Pitt, technically, but I'm not
picky. I hope he doesn't get killed at the end, as I am called Ashley
as well.
2. Elmer Bernstein is one of a handful of famous people called
'Elmer'. Perhaps because of this, he was asked to supply the musical score,
which is quite famous nowadays. It's generally very loud and brassy, but
so well-written that it doesn't grate or become too noticeable - a bit
like Star Wars, in fact, but more jaunty. It doesn't seem particularly
old-fashioned, and bits of it sound positively modern - there's a four-chord
'general overview of the camp' theme which wouldn't be out of place in
a modern blockbuster. I don't think he won an Academy Award for this film.
8. James Garner befriends a German guard in order to steal some
of his papers. He accomplishes this in an extremely roundabout way that
stretches credibility. Firstly, he lures the guard into his room (purely
out of friendship, mind - there weren't any gay people in the 1940s),
tempts him with a bar of Lindt's finest Irish Coffee liqueur, and, when
the guard resists, James Garner picks his pocket whilst pretending to
stuff the chocolate into the guard's jacket. Suppose the guard had taken
the chocolate and walked off? What then? Suppose the guard's wallet had
been in another pocket? Eh?
9. At one point our heroes make what appears to be Vodka. Given
the destructive effect Vodka had on the Russian economy, why didn't the
Germans think to swamp the camp with booze? They wouldn't have had any
escapes after that.
9. Is the British second-in-command bloke the scientist bloke from
Quatermass and the Pit? Robert Richard David John James Donald.
James Donald. Looks like Dan Dare. Earthed the electromagnetic Devil,
which sounds like it should be a line from a William Burroughs book or
something. "Earthing the Electromagnetic Devil" by William Burroughs.
There. Was James Donald famous? Are there pages on the internet about
him? Is he still alive? Probably not, given that he seems to be in his
forties in a film made forty years ago.
9. This is one of those archetypal 'What would I do in a similar
situation?'-type films. I would try to dig a hole in a nearby forest,
and 'hole' up (pun) for a week or so with a bar of a chocolate and a copy
of the Medved's Golden Turkey Awards and some of those lemony handwipes
that you get in KFC. The various escape plans described in The Great
Escape all seem too elaborate to be feasible (and, in the end, they
were too elaborate, as the eventual successful escapees simply
sail down a river / ride a bicycle to freedom, instead of messing around
with trains).
9. In response to the 'Your German's very good' gag, I would be
so tempted to reply, with a heavy German accent, 'Yes, I have a
degree in German'.
That doesn't really work as a gag, does it? What's the German equivalent
of a degree in English?
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Men aren't supposed to smile at each other. Especially
when they're that close. On the right, Steve McQueen was one of the few
actors who could powerslide a motorbike to a mark, whilst looking in the
right direction and conveying fear.
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11. Where there any similar attempts to tunnel under the Berlin Wall?
Apart from the Berlin subway system, that is? Or where there easier ways
to escape (if, indeed, anybody actually tried to escape)?
10. James Coburn doesn't feature as much as he would have done if
I had made the film. He plays an Irish person, and his attempt at an Irish
accent explains why he wasn't frequently cast as Irish people thereafter.
Postscript: Actually, he was supposed to be playing an Australian. Which
means that his accent is even worse. That said, he escapes in the end, so
it obviously didn't do him any harm.
8. In fact, with reference to the very first point, there isn't a
single female speaking part in the whole film. We see some women on a train,
and in the background, but they don't speak. It doesn't hurt the film, and
makes me wonder why more films don't have all-male casts. Women just lead
men astray. They are The Other.
9. How much fuel does Steve McQueen have in that bike, anyway? It
never seems to run out. He ends up entangled in some wire after crashing
into the Swiss border. He almost knocks the frontier over, in fact, and
it looks as if he could have escaped by just driving full-tilt at it.
11. Oh. David McCallum doesn't make it.
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'My dog has no nose.'
'Really? How does it smell?'
'I had to shut it up somehow. Bloody thing wouldn't stop barking. I told
him he'd be sorry. He didn't listen. They never do.'
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12. Apparently, films are not allowed to be show in Germany if
they feature swastikas. There are only a couple in The Great Escape,
so presumably they are either cut, or the film is not shown. Alternatively,
the film could be banned, which could mean that it has the same cult following
that A Clockwork Orange had until it was unbanned quite recently
and people realised that it was rubbish.
2. Donald Pleasance doesn't make it either. Contrary to popular
belief, he never says 'Take me with you, I can see perfectly'. That was
a misquotation started by Hugh Dennis of Punt & Dennis, on The
Mary Whitehouse Experience, that has persisted in the popular memory
ever since.
Pleasance is, nonetheless, remarkably unsettling. More so than in Halloween
or You Only Live Twice, as he's supposed to be a hero, and smiles
a lot. According to the documentary on the DVD, he spent part of World
War Two interned in one of the sister camps of the one in the film. Along
with James Doohan and Anthony Quinn, he makes up a select band of thesping
WW2 heroes.
9. Also contrary to popular belief, the theme tune is not whistled.
It's played with conventional instruments.
564. I had always assumed that the 'You speak very good English'
ruse wasn't actually used to trap one of the escapees, it was only used
in training. But no, I'm wrong. Gordon Jackson is undone with a 'Good
luck' from a French guard.
12. Rather like life in general, the film ends with tragedy, as
a great deal of the cast are machine-gunned. Fifty of the seventy-six
escapees, although I have no way of knowing whether these figures are
in accordance with reality (the film is based on a true story - a book,
in fact, one which I suspect is long out of print, but some of the cast
are composite characters). Somehow, it's more distressing to imagine Richard
Attenborough and Gordon Jackson being shot by the Gestapo, than some anonymous
servicemen.
13. James Coburn is helped to freedom by the French resistance,
whilst Charles Bronson and his assistant (who isn't played by a famous
actor) also escapes. James Garner is returned to the camp. Thankfully,
Steve McQueen is also spared.
19. Why didn't James Garner have a more impressive film career?
He had the chin of a leading man, but I only know him for The Rockford
Files. What could Burt Reynolds do that James Garner couldn't? Nothing.
Yet Burt went on to be one of the biggest film stars of the 1970s, whilst
Garner was Jim Rockford.
9. Like many old films, The Great Escape doesn't have a
long credit-scroll at the end with some of the soundtrack music and a
really bad song and some adverts for the novel, the original soundtrack
album, and the Songs from the film plus some random other songs
soundtrack album. It has all the credits at the beginning, shows a few
of the actors at the end, and just stops dead. When did this kind of thing
change? Was it something to do with the way that people would often see
more than one film at a time? Was it something to do with getting the
people out of the cinema quickly, or slowly, or what? I always stay until
the credits are finished so that I can get my money's worth.
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You've heard of a 'fractal zoom', haven't you? Here's
a 'McCallum zoom'. Note how the top half of his head is that of Leslie
Philips, whilst the bottom half is that of Bob Hope.
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Note the infinite level of detail present within the McCallum,
the way that patterns emerge and develop as we explore the depths of the
infinite.
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