When playing
tag-related games like capture-the-flag, it was just as important to remember
to leave someone to guard the prisoners from the rival team as it was to
advance on the rival team. If you didn’t watch the base, your prisoners might
escape. This is essentially the same principal as was held by prisoners-of-war
during WWII; the more efforts for escape meant more German soldiers needed to
guard the prisoners. This was why the Germans decided to create Stalag Luft
III, a maximum security prisoner-of-war camp meant to hold the most notorious
escape artists. This was the Alcatraz of war
camps, but the culmination of so many crafty minds resulted in the largest
prison breakout ever attempted.
The Great
Escape is exactly what it advertises itself as, a prison escape film from
beginning to end. There is no extraneous material about the soldiers leading up
to their initial capture, and no footage of previous prison camps. All the
film’s narrative is concerned with is the prison escape based on actual
historical events, and we are told in the beginning by text that the details of
the actual escape are kept accurate in the telling of the film. Despite the
directness of the film’s narrative, The Great Escape still has a running time
of 172 minutes. This is due to the ensemble cast full of lively and eclectic
characters, a method of storytelling not unfamiliar to director John Sturges
(The Magnificent Seven).
This cast
includes the memorable performance by Steve McQueen as the baseball-loving,
motorcycle riding American with seventeen escape attempts under his belt before
even arriving at the new camp. Each of the different men have tasks or special
abilities that they perform in the aid of the escape. Hilts (McQueen) is
especially skilled at spending an inordinate amount of time in the cooler, due
to his excessive escape attempts. Hendley (James Garner) is skilled at finding
items, giving him the title as the gang’s scrounger, while his bunkmate (Donald
Pleasance) is a skilled forger given the task of making fake documents for the
prisoners escaping. There are also tunnel diggers (Charles Bronson, John
Leyton), a man in charge of dispersing the dirt from the tunnel (David
McCallum), and at least half-a-dozen other jobs. The star-studded cast also
includes Richard Attenborough, James Coburn, Gordon Jackson and James Donald.
The Blu-ray
release is an appropriately polished presentation of this 1963 classic,
complete with a DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack for Elmer Bernstein’s
unforgettable soundtrack. This must be one of the top movie soundtracks to be
whistled. In fact, I’m certain more people know the score’s main tune than have
actually seen the film. The special features on the disc include an audio
commentary by director Sturges with various cast and crew members thrown in the
mix. The real bonus is the myriad of making-of featurettes. There are a total
of eight, with various topics that include the true story the film was based
upon.
Entertainment Value:
9/10
Quality of
Filmmaking: 9/10
Historical
Significance: 9/10
Disc Features: 8/10
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