The Great Escape: Not Caught
In the early 1950s, director John Sturges, then under contract at MGM, read a condensed version of Paul Brickhill’s memoir The Great Escape, which details the mass escape of downed fighter pilots from the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III in March 1944. Sturges recognized the story’s cinematic potential and took it to producer Samuel Goldwyn. According to Glenn Lovell’s Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges, Goldwyn’s response was, “What the hell kind of escape is this? Nobody gets away!”
Well, not “nobody.” Of the seventy-six POWs who escaped, three eventually made it to Allied territory. The rest were rounded up by the Gestapo, and fifty of them were executed, causing international outrage. But Goldwyn’s was not an isolated opinion. Sturges’s own assistant, Robert E. Relyea, said, “It’s about a bunch of guys in a prison camp who eventually get executed. That’s a tough sell.” The director, though, was a great admirer of Jean Renoir’s World War I POW-camp movie, Grand Illusion, in which the success of the escape is darkened by ambiguity. Sturges would borrow heavily from that film for the famous tunnel-digging sequence of 1963’s The Great Escape.
As the fifties progressed and Sturges was busy making a name for himself as a director with a gift for action sequences—in films such as Jeopardy, Escape from Fort Bravo (both 1953), and Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)—a couple of films about World War II POWs came out and were critical and commercial hits, cementing Sturges’s conviction that The Great Escape would land with audiences. Neither film was exactly feel-good either: Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953) has a cynical bite; David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) is a rousing war movie in which the two main characters (William Holden and Alec Guinness) are killed. Later in life, Sturges reminisced, “When I said I wanted to make [The Great Escape], everybody thought I was crazy. I don’t think anybody understood how an escape that doesn’t come off could be a picture. I did.”
During the years it took him to secure the rights to Brickhill’s book, Sturges directed the Seven Samurai adaptation The Magnificent Seven (1960), which was a sleeper hit and gave him leverage to finally get his dream project off the ground. It also showed that a film didn’t necessarily need to have female characters to do well with audiences (another one of the original objections to The Great Escape). The adaptation process involved several writers and lasted nearly two years, with novelists W. R. Burnett and James Clavell—the latter an ex-POW brought in to add a British flavor where appropriate, since many of the characters are British—ultimately receiving credit for the screenplay. Sturges also hired Wally Floody as a technical adviser. Floody was a Canadian ex-POW who had designed and dug the tunnels at Stalag Luft III. After seeing the tunnel set built by art director Fernando Carrere at Bavaria Studios in Germany, Floody said, “You must be getting something right because I’m having terrible nightmares.” There are certainly fictionalizations in the film; Steve McQueen’s famous motorcycle chase, of course, is one, as is an attempt to flee the Germans via plane. (It should be noted, however, that many of the real-life POWs did hope to come across airfields during their escape attempts. They were all pilots, after all.) But much of the film comes directly from the book: the ingenious method of dirt dispersal in the yard, the use of bed slats to prop up the tunnel walls, the choir practices held to cover up the sounds of hammering, the catastrophic miscalculation of tunnel length. The script is alternately mischievous, outraged, suspenseful, and mournful in tone, and Sturges does not shy away from any of it. Instead, he leans into the swerves, just like you’re supposed to. He’s as interested in the activities of the “tailor” (tasked with creating civilian clothes out of materials at hand in the camp), or the tender friendship between two prisoners, as he is in McQueen’s thrilling dash to freedom.
The first twenty minutes of The Great Escape serve as an example of Sturges’s nuts-and-bolts expertise, an object lesson in how to establish a story efficiently, introducing characters, plot, and atmosphere with minimal dialogue. To the accompaniment of Elmer Bernstein’s fife-and-drum score, a convoy of trucks arrives at the high-security prison camp. The prisoners, all being transferred from other camps because of their dogged escape attempts, disembark and waste no time in looking for potential routes out of the place. Character introductions are casual, with no one man pulled out for special attention. Captain Virgil Hilts (McQueen) strolls along the perimeter, eyeing the fence. Danny (Charles Bronson) and Willie (British pop star John Leyton) take one look at the camp’s layout and have a huddled confab about tunnel length. James Garner’s Hendley, resplendent in white turtleneck and American officer’s uniform, is busted for peering too closely at a truck, inspecting it for parts to steal. There is no sense of intimidation at their surroundings, no sense that they are cowed by the Luftwaffe officers in command.
The 1944 escape from Stalag Luft III was the largest such attempt at the camp, but it was far from the first. The main point of a breakout was not necessarily even to make it to freedom. In the film, Richard Attenborough as Big X (loosely based on the South African fighter pilot Roger Bushell), the mastermind of the plan to break 250 men out of the camp at once, declares, “It is my duty to harass, confound, and confuse the enemy to the best of my ability . . . I’m going to cause such a terrible stink in that Third Reich of theirs that thousands of troops that could well be employed at the front will be tied up here looking after us.” When Hilts, the “cooler king,” a veteran of seventeen escape attempts who is reluctant at first to join the “committee’s” plan for a mass escape, is brought back to the camp after yet another failed try, one POW says to another, “I didn’t think they’d catch him so soon.” The reply: “He’s not caught.”
“The idea that a person’s soul is uncapturable is at the heart of The Great Escape’s enduring appeal.”
McQueen was reportedly irritated by his role in The Great Escape, thinking he didn’t have enough to do. One of the movie’s most exciting and well-known sequences, the climactic chase in which Hilts steals a motorcycle at a checkpoint and jumps multiple barbed-wire fences, was added to beef up McQueen’s part as well as allow him to show off his skills. The moment when Hilts uses a dip in the land to propel the bike up over one of the barriers was performed by McQueen stunt double and pal Bud Ekins. (Editor Ferris Webster deserved his Oscar nomination for that cut alone. The illusion that it is the actor himself is total.) McQueen’s complaints aside, it is hard to imagine a more perfect marriage between actor and part. As with all great movie stars—and McQueen was the ultimate movie star—he gives a performance that moves out of realism and into the mythic.
Even when McQueen’s body is still, which is rarely, you can sense electricity sparking, signaling readiness for action. There’s always a latent urgency in him. When he moves, he means it. His greatest gift—mentioned by practically everyone who worked with him, including Sturges—was his ability to observe, listen, and react. Hilts’s character arc is about relinquishing his individuality to submit to the group: not an easy thing for someone like McQueen. There was always something a little frightening about him: those icy eyes, that tight smile. When Hilts does succumb, the emotional payoff is enormous.
“The film is about a serious subject, told without self-seriousness. Because of this, it doesn’t date at all.”
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