Review of The Great Escape (1963) by Filipeneto — 06 Dec 2020

This film was made as a kind of homage to the fifty Allied war prisoners who were killed in the course of a spectacular escape from a Luftwaffe prison camp. This is a historical and well-known fact, and we can even visit the camp, which has been preserved. But don't expect this film to be a faithful reconstruction of the facts, because it is not. The film abuses of creative liberty and much of what we see in the film was invented or restructured. There are characters that mix the characteristics of more than one real individual, there are things that never happened (the plane flight, for example) and the participation of American POW's in the escape attempt was not so noteworthy. But Hollywood has already used us for films that disregard history accuracy.

The cast is luxurious and has a lot of eminent actors. I particularly liked the good work shown by Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson and Richard Attenborough, who give life to three of the main conspirators in the escape. McQueen gives life to a fugitive veteran, tireless in his attempts but who always ends up in the "cooler", planning the next one; Bronson also became very sympathetic thanks to his fear of tight spaces. In addition to them, the film features the excellent work of James Garner, Donald Pleasence, Nigel Stock, Angus Lennie, James Coburn and Hannes Messemer, the latter of them in the role of the German camp commander. In general, everyone had time to show value, and they did it, making good use of the material they received, in particular the excellent dialogues.

The film is almost three hours long, but it is worth every minute and never makes us feel that we waste time in unnecessary details. Well filmed, he has a good cinematography and has worked hard to build realistic and credible sets and costumes. It is not the kind of war movie loaded with shootings and action scenes, even though it has several tense scenes and some exciting pursuits. We could really feel how tight that tunnel was, and how much each of those men has risked to, at least, cause the biggest possible disturbance behind the enemy's lines. Another essential detail of this film is its iconic soundtrack, signed by Elmer Bernstein. The sum of all this results in one of the most notable classical war films, which even inspired other cinema works, such as "Chicken Run", a stop-motion animated film where we can see the structure of the prison camp in that great chicken coop, and also listen to this film's theme song as those chickens desperately try to get away.