A good tragic war-adventure with a few faults

Rating: 7/10 (4 January 2011)

The true story that The Great Escape is based on is indeed a remarkable one. It's certainly one of the key reasons that this war film has attained such a level of affection over the years. Although, it's ultimately hardly a happy story seeing as many of the participants never made it out alive. This is, for me its greatest trump card. As The Great Escape is essentially a tragedy dressed up as an upbeat war-adventure. It's an unusual combination but it works well. What has made the film so popular is no doubt a combination of this tragic true story with the rousing escape scenes, the all-star cast and the famous music. It's a war film that doesn't really have a lot of action; it's more of a character-based drama for the most part, so the people depicted here are fairly well-drawn. Although it does have to be said that the characters are not faultless â€“ James Coburn has truly the worst Australian accent I have ever heard, Charles Bronson's claustrophobia on the escape night is a tiresome addition to his character seeing as he was instrumental in actually building the tunnel, while Steve McQueen's character came across a little too devil-may-care to be entirely believable - the scene where he knocks over a guard with no repercussions at all was just stretching believability too much for me. In fact, overall, the film made the prisoner-of-war camp out to be a very lenient place indeed, where the inmates were seemingly at liberty to show blatant disrespect to the Germans, and were able to run rings round them quite easily. Now it may be that these details are based on reality, I cannot say with any certainty but I do have my doubts and I think that Hollywood has simply sugar-coated this side of the story. Nevertheless, despite these drawbacks The Great Escape remains an engaging film. Most probably, this is mainly due to the incredible cast at its disposal and a few iconic scenes. But also the simple fact that it's a great story.