Enjoyable film

Rating: 7/10 (21 July 2004)

Realizing that I was not supposed to accept `The Great Escape' as High Art, I found it to be an entertaining film. The story about a group of hard-scrabble soldiers in a German P.O.W. camp who are rounded up and thrown together because they are the prisoners who have attempted escape the most, is not deep in the slightest, and fairly formulaic, (I was able to announce the ending of the film, music, dialogue and all, about ten minutes before the actual end) but enjoyable nonetheless.
One thing that I enjoyed knowing while watching the film was that the director, John Sturges, not only is the director of one of those other `manly man classic' films, `The Magnificent Seven', but the director of the god-awful Gene Hackman film, `Marooned' that was so gleefully torn apart on Mystery Science Theater 3000. I guess for every few good films, you can be allowed a stinker. That's only one of the many lessons I learned watching `The Great Escape', however. Among the many things I learned as I enjoyed this film were that James Coburn should never attempt an Australian accent, that Charles Bronson was unbelievably buff in 1963, and Steve McQueen always looked 43 years old.
`The Great Escape' is a good film and deserves its place on the IMDB top 250 list, but it certainly has a core audience, and while I truly enjoyed the film, I'm not really a member of that core audience. I liked it enough to appreciate it and give it a good review once, but I don't think I'll be sneaking this one into the DVD player in the next five years. Certainly not because of the film making itself, or the plot, which was good, it's just one of those `watch it one time and leave it at that' films for me personally.
--Shelly