Takes Stalag 17 and Improves Upon It

Rating: 8/10 (1 April 2010)

In the tradition of Billy Wilder's "Stalag 17", we have a group of soldiers (some seemingly American, some British) trapped in a German POW camp. Steve McQueen, who plays the Cooler King, has tried to escape many times before... but now there's a whole campwide effort to dig tunnels under the camp. Can it work?
James Garner, who plays the Scrounger, really steals the show. McQueen is top billed, and plays the handsome lead, but he really just works on the outskirts of the plot for most of the film. Garner is right in the center, fulfilling the role William Holden had in "Stalag" and Morgan Freeman would have in "Shawshank Redemption".
I also have to give a shout-out to a fairly young Donald Pleasence, who plays Flight Lt. Colin Blythe "The Forger". Okay, maybe not that young, but for those of us who know him from the horror films of the 1980s... (And best of all, Pleasance was an actual POW in a German camp during WWII.)
"Great Escape" is humorous, it has characters we actually give a hoot about, and it had a major influence on a lot of later great films: "The Goonies" and "Shawshank Redemption", for example. I wish I could say more about how great this film is... it's really worth a viewing or two.