The best war film ever made

Rating: Null/10 (13 March 2015)

My fifth favourite film of all time, it gets my vote as the best war film ever made. I love that its focus on is not a great battle but the ingenuity and bravery of ordinary men in an extraordinary situation. The film is a thrilling, rollicking adventure with moments of great escapism but at the same time it is often moving and it's extremely well characterised. The film is incredibly well structured. It may be 2 hours and 43 minutes long yet it drags for less than two minutes of that time.
As it says at the beginning of the film, the characters are fictionalised composites of the Stalag Luft III inmates but it hues closely to the events surrounding the actual Great Escape. It's a film that respects the audience's intelligence. There is no happy ending. In the film, as in real life, only 3 of the 76 escapees managed to evade capture and 50 of those who were recaptured were murdered. The film is dedicated to their memory.
It has one of the best casts of any film that I've ever seen and John Sturges' direction is fantastic. I don't think that there's anyone who gives a bad performance. Sturges also directed my fourth favourite film, "The Magnificent Seven", in which Steve McQueen, James Coburn and Charles Bronson also starred. Both films certainly benefit from excellent scores by Elmer Bernstein.
I liked the fact that not all of the Nazis are treated as being completely evil. Werner, who disappears after the first half sadly, doesn't seem too different from the kind of soldier that you'd find in any army and even the camp commandment Colonel von Luger shows a glimmer of conscience when he tells Ramsey that 50 of the escapees have been shot.
They don't make them like this anymore. I'm glad that the film was made in 1963 because I doubt that it would be made with the same subtlety, intelligence or attention to detail now. They would probably give it a Hollywood style ending.