The Great Escape (film)
The Great Escape, written by James Clavell, W.R. Burnett, and Walter Newman (uncredited), and directed by John Sturges is a popular 1963 World War II film starring Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough and James Garner, based on a true story about Allied prisoners of war with a record for escaping from German prisoner-of-war camps. The Luftwaffe placed them in a new more secure camp, Stalag Luft III, from which they promptly formed a plan to break out 250 men.
The film was based upon the factual book of the same name by Paul Brickhill, who observed the actual events as a prisoner, as did George Harsh who supplied the introduction. Harsh, one of the few Americans in the British section of Stalag Luft III, died in 1980 at age 72, according to a 1980 page of obituaries in Time magazine.
Featuring an all-star cast including McQueen (whose motorcycle chase is the film's most remembered action scene; he also did many of his own stunts), James Garner, Richard Attenborough, James Coburn, Charles Bronson and Donald Pleasence, The Great Escape is regarded as a classic and frequently repeated on television.
The march tune that serves as the film's theme,
written by Elmer Bernstein, has also become a classic.
Cast
Steve
McQueen - Capt. Hilts "The Cooler King"
James Garner - Flight Lt. Hendley "The Scrounger"
Richard
Attenborough - Squadron Leader Roger Bartlett "Big X"
James Donald
- Group Capt. Ramsey "The SBO"
Charles Bronson - Flight Lt. Danny Velinski "The Tunnel King"
Donald Pleasence - Flight Lt. Colin Blythe "The Forger"
James Coburn - Flying Officer Louis Sedgwick "The Manufacturer"
Hannes Messemer - Col. von Luger
David McCallum - Lt. Cmdr. Eric Ashley-Pitt
"Dispersal"
Gordon Jackson - Flight Lt. Sandy MacDonald "Intelligence"
John Leyton - Flight Lt. William Dickes "The Tunneler"
Angus
Lennie - Flying Officer Archibald Ives "The Mole"
Nigel Stock -
Flight Lt. Denys Cavendish "The Surveyor"
Robert Graf - Werner
'The Ferret'
Jud Taylor - Goff
Hans Reiser - Herr Kuhn
Harry Riebauer
- German Sgt. Strachwitz
William Russell - Sorren
Robert Freitag - Capt.
Posen
Ulrich Beiger - Preissen
George Mikell - Lt. Dietrich
Lawrence
Montaigne - Haynes ('Diversions')
Robert Desmond - Griffith 'Tailor'
Til Kiwe - Frick
Heinz Weiss - Kramer
Tom Adams - Dai Nimmo ('Diversions')
Karl-Otto Alberty - Steinach
Plot
Upset
by the soldiers and resources wasted in recapturing escaped Allied prisoners of
war, the German High Command concentrates the most-determined and successful of
these prisoners to a new, high-security prisoner of war camp that the commandant,
Colonel von Luger (Hannes Messemer), proclaims escape-proof.
The Gestapo deliver to the camp the most dangerous prisoner of all, "Big X", Squadron Leader Roger Bartlett (Richard Attenborough), warning him that he will be shot should he ever again escape. Locked up with "every escape artist in Germany", Bartlett immediately plans the greatest escape attempted — a tunnel system for exfiltrating 250 prisoners of war.
The first escape attempt, conceived whilst in the cooler, is by USAAF Capt. Virgil Hilts (McQueen) and RAF Flight Officer Archibald Ives (Angus Lennie); they are caught and returned to the cooler. Later, when the three Americans in camp (Hendley, Hilts, and Goff) are celebrating American Independence Day with the other PoWs, the guards discover tunnel "Tom". Because of that, the depressed Ives climbs the barbed wire fence to escape, while in view of the tower guards. Hilts notices and runs to stop him, but is too late as Ives is machine-gunned dead on the wire.
Teams of men are organised to survey, dig, hide soil, manufacture civilian clothing, forge documents, provide security and distractions, and procure contraband materials. The worst of the work noise was covered from the men choir singing, and dirt from the tunnels was concealed in the mens' trousers and emptied in the gardens. Flight Lieutenant Hendley (James Garner), "the scrounger", finds ingeniously devious ways to get whatever the others need, from a camera to identity cards. Australian Flying Officer Louis Sedgwick (James Coburn), "the manufacturer", makes many of the tools they need, such as picks for digging and bellows for pumping breathable air into the tunnels. Flight Lieutenant Danny Velinski (Charles Bronson), "the tunnel king", is in charge of digging, despite having a fear of dark enclosed spaces. Forgery is handled by Flight Lieutenant Colin Blythe (Donald Pleasence), who is sent nearly blind from the highly intricate work by candlelight; Hendley takes it upon himself to be Blythe's guide in the escape. Meanwhile, Captain Virgil Hilts "The Cooler King", irritates the guards with frequent escapes and irreverent behaviour. Bartlett persuades Hilts to reconnoiter the immediate vicinity of the PoW camp during one of his escapes, then allow his recapture, allowing the cartographers to create guide maps out of German territory.
The prisoners work on three escape tunnels ("Tom", "Dick", and "Harry") simultaneously. After the first tunnel is discovered, they abandon the second tunnel and put all their efforts into completing the third. The last part of the tunnel is completed on the night of the escape, but is found to be twenty feet short of the woods that would provide cover. Nevertheless, seventy-six men escape before one is finally spotted coming out of the tunnel.
After various attempts to reach neutral Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain, almost all of the escaped PoWs are recaptured or killed: Hendley and Blythe steal a trainer aeroplane, intending a Swiss flight; the aeroplane breaks down and crashes enroute. Soldiers arrive at the crash site, shooting Blythe while Hendley surrenders. Flight Lieutenant Cavendish (Nigel Stock), having hitched a lift in a truck, is captured at a checkpoint. Bartlett, and Mac (Gordon Jackson), are recognised at a bahnhof by the Gestapo, but manage to escape after fellow PoW Eric Ashley-Pitt (David McCallum) sacrifices himself by killing the Gestapo agent; Bartlett and Mac are captured in the town. Last, Hilts attempts to jump the barbed wire Swiss-German border fence with a stolen Wehrmacht motorcycle; it is the highlight escape.
Only three evade capture and make it to safety. Velinski and Flight Lieutenant Willy Dickes (the tunnel kings) steal a rowboat and proceed downriver to the Baltic coast, where they successfully board a Swedish merchant ship. Sedgewick hides in a boxcar and makes it all the way to France, and while resting in a café the local Resistance stages a drive-by shooting of some German officers. After realising he is an Allied PoW, the Resistance enlist the help of a guide to get Sedgewick into Spain.
As for the others, fifty re-captured PoWs, including Bartlett, Mac, and Cavendish, are shot in a field. Meanwhile, Hendley and twenty-one others are returned to the stalag. The Senior British Officer, Grp Cpt Ramsey (James Donald) is told of the massacre by von Luger, who has been relieved of command.
Hilts returns to the camp, and subsequently to the cooler. His fellow American officer Goff throws him his baseball and glove as he walks into solitary confinement. The film ends with Hilts locked in the cooler, as the guard walks away, he hears Hilts bouncing the baseball against the cell walls.
The
Great Escape in popular culture
An ad for beer was made in the early 1990s
and shown on British TV. It featured some of McQueen's scenes from the film and
included additional surreal footage with Griff Rhys Jones.
Some ads for the
Hummer H3 in the fall of 2006 played the tune, as the employees of a nondescript
company plot a "Great escape" to drive their Hummers, with a parking
lot booth attendant mimicking throwing a baseball against the wall like Steve
McQueen.
An Australian Shell Oil television commercial from 1988 paid homage
to Hilts' motorbike escape by having the hero escape German soldiers but not before
filling up his motorbike at an abandoned Shell petrol station. However, unlike
the movie, the hero manages to jump the last barricade and escape into the distance.
This commercial was parodied in an episode of Fast Forward, with a different
ending. After completing the jump, the hero looks back in triumph, and is promptly
gunned down by his pursuers. The commercial's motto is then shown: "There
is more than one kind of Shell".
In The Simpsons episode A Streetcar
Named Marge (1992), Maggie plots a "Great Escape" from the Ayn Rand
School for Tots.
The popular sitcom Hogan's Heroes was a spoof based on The
Great Escape and Stalag 17.
In Red Dwarf episode "Queeg", Holly
begins whistling the tune as a plan is set in motion to oppose the demanding backup
computer Queeg, while Lister and The Cat scrub the floor to his whistling. In
a later episode Pete: Part I a skutter (called Bob) keeps whistling the tune while
helping Lister and Rimmer out of the trouble they keep getting into (at that point,
they are both serving a two-year sentence in the ship's brig).
The animated
film Chicken Run (2000) contains many references. The film also references Stalag
17, considered (along with "Escape") to be one of the greatest World
War II prisoner-of-war movies.
The Great Escape theme tune is used in an Australian
beer advertisement for Tooheys, where people launch beer brewing ingredients into
the sky, eventually producing "beer rain".
In the first Charlie's
Angels movie, the character Bosley (played by Bill Murray), while being held hostage
by the criminals, has a baseball glove and is sitting on the floor throwing a
baseball against the wall like Steve McQueen.
In football at the England National
team games a group of fans called The England Supporters Band plays the great
escape tune with musical instruments (especially trumpet and drum) and the fans
sing and clap to the tune.
An episode of The Life and Times of Juniper Lee
shares the same name of the movie.
In the PS2 video game Metal Gear Solid
3, the character Major Zero initially adopts the codename "Major Tom",
in reference to the name of the tunnel used in The Great Escape to successfully
escape. However, after the failure of the first mission, Zero reveals that, upon
watching the film again, the tunnel "Tom" was one of the two discovered
by the Stalag guards. He then returns to using "Major Zero," believing
that his mistake brought bad luck upon the Virtuous Mission. The name, however,
is intended to be more of a reference to David Bowie's Space Oddity.
British
stand-up comedian Eddie Izzard's 1997 "Dress to Kill" performance included
an 8-minute segment about "The Great Escape" in which Izzard humorously
questioned the plausibility of the movie's plot and the demoralizing fact that
all the British characters ended tragically despite all their cunning and planning
while the Americans--notably Steve McQueen--survive. Known for his surrealist,
stream-of-consciousness type of stand-up comedy, Izzard would digress often during
this particular routine as he tried to remember all the characters and actors.
This is exemplified best on the CD version of "Dress To Kill" where
Izzard gets heckled by a fan during the Great Escape bit, demanding that Izzard
"moves on".
An Australian music festival, held at Newington Armoury
within the Homebush Olympic Development, bears the same name as the movie. The
festival originated as The Cockatoo Island Festival in 2005 then was moved to
Newington and the name changed to The Great Escape for the 2006 festival, which
was held over the Easter long weekend. Following its success in 2006, The Great
Escape returned to Newington Armory over the Easter long weekend 2007 and a third
outing is planned for Easter 2008.
British comedy series Monty Python's Flying
Circus once referenced The Great Escape; in the episode "Mr And Mrs Brian
Norris' Ford Popular", a sketch featured three spokesmen for the weight-loss
aid "Trim-Jeans", who were hosting "Trim-Jeans Theatre Presents",
which featured adaptations of famous films and plays featuring characters clad
in Trim-Jeans and making references to losing weight during their performance.
The highlight of the show was "the Trim-Jeans version of 'The Great Escape',
with a cast of thousands losing well over fifteen hundred inches", and which
featured nearly everyone in the film (Allied escapees and German guards--and even
their guard dogs) involved in a massive chase following the POW escape; a caption
appeared during the chase proclaiming "INCHES LOST SO FAR" with a counter
that increased as the chase went on.
Denton Designs and Ocean produced a 3D
isometric game inspired by the film in 1986, for ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, DOS
and Amstrad CPC.
The opening scene of Reservoir Dogs features Mr. Brown (Quentin
Tarantino) explaining the premise of Madonna's "Like a Virgin" and referring
to a man as being similar to Charles Bronson in The Great Escape stating, "he's
digging tunnels".
In Michael Palin's and Terry Jones's Ripping Yarns,
there is an episode called "Escape from Stalag Luft 112B". It's about
Major Phipps a POW who keeps escaping from the Germans and ends up as the only
man Never to escape from Stalag Luft 112B.
In the American television show
Supernatural, there are many references to The Great Escape. The main characters,
Sam Winchester and Dean Winchester, often refer to each other as McQueen and Garner
during their own escapes from law enforcement.
In The Parent Trap (1998),
Lindsay Lohan's characters are lead to an isolated camp cabin with the Great Escape
march playing over the scene.
Designer Andrew Ibi launched a limited edition
clothing line in 2006 in conjunction with Oki-Ni featuring a depiction of McQueen's
face from the movie.
Historical accuracy
Three
tunnels were dug, shored and lighted as portrayed. The Germans discovered one
just shy of completion. Sand from the tunnels was put in bags hidden in the trousers.
The prisoners would wander the camp spreading the dirt. The men doing this job
were known as "penguins".
POWs who came up with plans to escape
needed permission to proceed from the Escape Committee. This was in order to avoid
conflicting escape plans from cancelling each other: an escaping prisoner being
caught by the guards could cause the alarm to be raised and ruin another escape
attempt; thus Hilts and Ives need Bartlett's permission before attempting to dig
under the wire.
Per Paul Brickhill, who didn't go through the tunnel, claimed
that, due to a miscalculation, the tunnel ended short of the tree line. According
to Alan Burgess, in The Longest Tunnel (1990, Grove Press), the tunnel did reach
the forest, yet it was so sparse it provided insufficient cover. The escape had
to proceed or the forged identity and travel papers would become invalid. The
prisoners fabricated the papers and their escape suits.
Only 76, of the projected
250 men, escaped while an air raid occurred; only three POWs escaped Germany into
neutral territory: the Norwegians Per Bergsland and Jens Müller who escaped
to Sweden, and the Dutchman Bram van der Stok who reached Spain.
The Gestapo
killed 50 of the recaptured POWs, a serious violation of the Geneva Convention.
Roger Bartlett was based on Roger Bushell, the mastermind of the escape, a
brilliant organiser and a natural leader of men. The scar underneath the character's
eye is a tribute to Bushell, a competitive skier who suffered an accident on the
slopes that scarred him.
Group Captain Nicolas Tindal was in charge of forging
documents for the escapers.
Danny Velinski is based principally on Wally Floody,
a Canadian mining engineer and pilot, who was a technical advisor for the film.
He was transferred elsewhere before the escape occurred. The character also represents
F/Lt Ernst Valenta, F/O Danny Krol, and F/O Wlodzimierz Adam Kolanowski who designed
and maintained the tunnels. They escaped, but were captured and shot.[1]
One
important fact kept out of the film was the help the POWs received from outside
the camp, some of it from the home countries. POWs received much material from
home that proved invaluable for this and other escapes. Acting through secret
agencies such as MI9, families from Allied nations would send maps, papers, tools,
and disguise material hidden in gifts, books, food, and objects. For example a
map of Germany was concealed in a pen. Ex-POWs asked the filmmakers to exclude
such details lest it jeopardize future POW escapes.
While 76 prisoners did
escape from Stalag Luft III, larger escapes occurred during World War II:
A
total of 132 Allied prisoners of war were freed by Yugoslav Partisans in a single
operation in August 1944 in what is known as the raid at St Lorenzen. Almost all
were successfully airlifted to Bari in Italy several weeks later.
The Cowra
breakout, August 1944, Australia: 545 Japanese POWs attempted escape and/or suicide.
231 prisoners and four Australian soldiers were killed and the surviving escapers
were recaptured.
At Sobibór extermination camp in October 1943, about
300 prisoners escaped. Only about 50 escapers survived the war. They killed at
least 11 SS and Trawniki in the lead-up to the break.
The escape from Oflag
XVII-A Doellersheim, Germany. Of 131 French soldiers in September 1943 only two
succeeded in evading recapture.
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