Here’s a two-year-old Great Escape piece that I have a special affection for. I’m posting it because there’s a vague association between this 1963 John Sturges classic and the 4th of July holiday.
I loved The Great Escape as a teenager and 20something but not lately. Lately it feels too smug and self-satisfied, too much jaunty humor. It’s almost played on a Hogan’s Heroes level. Cast to audience: “We may be portraying POWS but we’re a bunch of cool-attitude 30something actors and we can pretty much do anything we want within reason. (Including making our own potato vodka and throwing a 4th of July party.) It’s like high school, this prison. The German guards and officers are hugely irritated geometry and math teachers. ”Who’s throwing spitballs? Apparently some people in this room want detention!”
The only bad thing that happens during the entire camp portion (or about 65% to 70% of the film) is when one of the three tunnels is discovered by the Germans. That’s it! No other mishaps or mistakes except for the shooting of Angus Lennie‘s Archibald Ives, except in my book that’s a good thing. Because I hate his Brigadoon Scottish accent.
In no particular order…
(1) The German camp commanders are far too lenient with the prisoners, who after all have been put into this super-camp because they’re all disobedient bad apples with a high likelihood of trying to escape.
(2) Why oh why don’t the Germans simply post two guards inside each of the barracks so as to spot any possible digging going on?
(3) I despise Richard Attenborough‘s “Big X” character, such that I always feel a slight pang of pleasure when he gets machine-gunned to death near the end (not that the other 49 other prisoners being killed isn’t a tragedy, but at least Attenborough has been shut up for good).
(4) That scene when McQueen and Ives explain to their superiors how they intend to dig their way out under the fence like moles is completely absurd and not even vaguely funny, and McQueen’s delivery of his dialogue is straight out of The Honeymoon Machine.