HE regrets the passing of David McCallum. Then again the Scottish-born actor lived a rich and mostly robust 90 years, which puts him in a kind of creme de la creme realm. Plus we all have to go sometime.
I never felt much enthusiasm for his Illya Kuryakin character in The Man from U.N.C.L.E, but what could my personal interest in or enthusiasm for a rotely-written exotic second banana in a plastic James Bond ripoff…who cares about any of that stuff?
I was slightly more intrigued by McCallum’s portrayal of Lt. Cmdr. Eric Ashley-Pitt in The Great Escape (’63). Pitt was the guy who created that long-shoulder-sock-with-a-string device that enabled the prisoners of Stalag Luft III to camouflage the dirt that had come from the digging of the three tunnels, Tom, Dick and Harry.
On the other hand I was infuriated when Ashley-Pitt intentionally attracted attention and drew fire from German security forces at that train station so as to protect Richard Attenborough‘s Squadron Leader Roger Bartlett (aka “Big X”) and Gordon Jackson‘s Flight Lieutenant Alexander MacDonald.
Where is it written in the annals of honorable war behavior that sometimes a lower-ranked guy needs to sacrifice himself so that two higher-ranked guys can get away?
If I’d been in Ashley-Pitt’s shoes and saw that Bartlett and MacDonald were about to be captured, I would have kept my head down and said to myself “tough break for those guys…I’m very sorry but this is war and them’s the breaks…I’m sure as shit am not going to commit suicide so they can get away…fuck that noise.”
