McQueen's breakout: Cooler King becomes King of Cool

Rating: Null/10 (2 June 2002)

Sometimes a big, cynical package entertainment off the generic production line transcends its origins and goes into orbit, as it were, growing ever larger in memory. "Casablanca" was the classic example; "The Poseidon Adventure" and "The Towering Inferno" are more recent ones. For Brits, "The Great Escape" has this status: even as I write, soccer fans at the World Cup are beating out Elmer Bernstein's brisk march theme while England labours to a draw.
Not a great hit when released, "The Great Escape" clicked through repeated TV showings. It goes on clicking, like "Casablanca" or "Gone with the Wind"- because it embodies truth to the spirit of its own times as well as to what was 20 years in the past when it was filmed. As several reviewers have said, it doesn't wear out, and this is why.
By 1963 audiences were becoming bored with endless relivings of heroic World War Two exploits: adolescent moviegoers were too young to remember it and were tired of seeing their dads' doings, which made their own lives feel smaller and duller. But "The Great Escape" depicted a failed breakout from an inglorious captivity; less sharp than Wilder's "Stalag 17", it nonetheless managed to combine the expected set pieces of tension and derring-do with an incipient Swinging Sixties individualism. These guys are collaborating to dig their way out, but then they're on their own for the home run. Few make it.
Nobody incarnated the new spirit more than Hilts the Cooler King, played by Steve McQueen. The film made him a solo star name above the title: he stands out amid an ensemble as he didn't, quite, in Sturges's "Magnificent Seven". McQueen's persona was set by ex-POW James Clavell's dialogue. He's not the boring, by-the-numbers rebel designed by hacks to make an authority figure such as a cop more palatable to a rebellious teen audience. He's an instinctive, can't-help-it individualist.
McQueen is not gratuitously insubordinate towards his own superiors in the camp. Neither does he set out to provoke the Germans, who aren't hateful. Hilts can't help wanting to be beyond the barbed wire, and that makes his brand of rebelliousness less neurotic, more sympathetic to adult viewers than a crybaby, James Deanish sort would be. McQueen, then and later (eg in "The Towering Inferno") has the authority of the man who does not define his values solely by reaction against the consensus. As such, in "The Great Escape" he personifies democracy pitted against dictatorship in total war. He's voluntarily under orders for the duration, but he fights to be free again, and for ever: free to leap the wire and leave all confinement behind, far and fast. Meantime, he's self-contained, happy to play baseball against a blank wall, in no danger of going mad for want of company like a dictator's slave.
McQueen's American cool counterpoints the laid-back qualities of the British. Donald, Attenborough and Pleasence are all quietly magnetic, assured presences. No scenery chewers wanted- this is war, too serious for show-offs. Lennie, the man driven mad, disposes of himself.
The Anglo-American collaboration in this production is among the smoothest ever. The British movie business was turning into Hollywood, England; here was a story where no fancy plot tricks were needed to bring Limeys and Yanks together, and the Yanks were the kind we admired most: those who hadn't waited till Pearl Harbor but hastened to the anti-Nazi colours as freelances. Another reason to admire McQueen's maverick stance, and James Garner's quirkier version of it. At the same time, the overall patina is recognisably British stiff-upper-lip, like "Albert RN" or "The Colditz Story". There is little psychologising and no silly love interest; these chaps have a task to perform and they get on with it. Sturges was an admirer of the British martial spirit like his fellow he-man, Hemingway. It shows.
The script conflates incidents from several WW2 situations: a literal account of the March 1944 breakout at Sagan masterminded by Roger Bushell/Bartlett would have courted libel actions. Posters who criticise the portrayal of the camp have got it wrong. The men were in a Stalag, an officers' camp run by the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, not the SS. They were under the Geneva Convention, inspected by the Red Cross. Prisoners were treated with the courtesy due to involuntary guests, though on their honour not to attempt escape as their duty to their own countries required. Even at Colditz, the castle where incorrigible fugitives were immured, the amenities of commissioned rank were respected.
Many camp administrators were career soldiers who despised the Nazis; others had been transferred after being wounded in action, and had a fellow-feeling for enemies who had been captured. Inmates were encouraged to follow hobbies to take the itch out of their feet. The spirit was akin to that of von Stroheim's World War One schloss in "La Grande Illusion".
The scene where a "Hitler greeting" has to be dragged out of Luger is true to life: many senior Wehrmacht officers forbade their subordinates to "heil" in the mess. The massacre after recapture was perpetrated not by soldiers but by the Gestapo at Hitler's command, over protests from Goering and Keitel. The phrase "shot while trying to escape" became common currency as a euphemism for murder.