Movie Review: "The Great Escape"

My Christmas present this year came from our good friends Dave and Judy Jones was a DVD of the 1963 movie, "The Great Escape" that starred Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, and the proverbial cast of thousands, and directed by John Sturges. This movie has become a bit of a standing joke between the Joneses and us because they always quote their son Mike who once said of this movie: "The Great Escape. What was so great about it? Only three guys actually escaped."

So, we all got a laugh out of it when we exchanged gifts, but I was more than happy to receive it. I can recall seeing this movie in the theater when it came out in 1963. I would have been in seventh grade, and I no doubt probably didn't get much of the movie at the time. I do not believe that I had ever seen the movie again from start to finish in the 48 years that have passed, and I was anxious to watch it once more.

Well, I did watch this movie yesterday, and I enjoyed it very much. It has held up remarkably well over the past 48 years. So much so, that I have no doubt that an average teenager in what will soon be 2012 would enjoy it every bit as much as audiences did back in 1963.

The movie is based upon actual events that took place at a German POW camp in Poland during World War II. British and American POW's undertake an immense escape attempt that would involve over 250 prisoners escaping in one night. Well, as you can gather from Mike Jones' comment above, not all of them make it, but they do succeed in one very important goal - to disrupt and distract the German forces enough so that they have to track down these escapees, thus preventing the Nazis from actually concentrating on fighting the war. In that goal, they were most successful. (The accompanying documentary on the DVD talks about this aspect of the escape.)

Good performances by James Garner, Richard Attenborough, James Coburn, Charles Bronson and many others. As the years have gone by, this movie is probably most remembered for Steve McQueen bouncing a baseball against the wall of the "cooler" and escaping from half the German army on a motorcycle. McQueen is OK in the movie, I suppose, but I have come to the conclusion after seeing this movie and a couple of others over the past year or so, that McQueen, a huge star in the 60's and 70's and the absolute epitome of "cool" during that time, is way overrated in the memories of moviegoers. I watch him in some of these supposedly great roles of his, and all I can think of are about half a dozen actors, both contemporaries of his and current day actors, who were and are much, much better. In this very movie, James Garner is a perfect example of this hypothesis.

Be that as it may, if you've never seen "The Great Escape", or if it has been many years since you have seen it, give it a shot. I do not think that you will be disappointed.