The Great Escape: Classic or Jurassic (Park)?

it is also an inspiring motion picture though; me mate got arrested for smoking a quick pipe on brighton seafront, and despite them taking away his shoelaces, belt, etc. he was allowed to take his ball to the cells. just as soon as the door shut...

dhum dhum thuck!

dhum dhum thuck!

dhum dhum thuck!

(No idea why I posted it, but I also, am drunk)

also = fah bettah than grate excape which like all uk war movies = dreary

I'd never seen (all of) this movie before, because it's nearly three hours long and you can feel every unnecessary minute of it. Still fitfully iconic, of course, with the memorable/oft-referenced stuff overshadowing (or outlasting) the dull stuff, and kind of fascinating to watch as an artifact of old Hollywood on the cusp of the new.

though it meant this childhood delightr https://www.sixflags.com/greatescape/attractions/steamin-demon

I loved this movie as a kid and I still love it now and every single time I see it I'm convinced McQueen's going to jump the fence this time for sure

I loved this movie as a kid

This is another thing related to my post. I know a lot of people have fond memories of this from their childhood, or they used to watch it as a family at Christmas, or whatever, but I cannot imagine any kid sitting through it.

I was gonna say this whole genre of men on a mission epic feels designed to play on the tv during some family holiday, comforting and entertaining while you let that big meal settle into your stomach, get out the booze, if you nap for 15min it's no big deal. Which certainly wasn't the original intention but what can I say, sometimes things just work themselves out like that. To which point:

I cannot imagine any kid sitting through it.

They didn't! They had it on in the background while playing with their new toys, might look up every now and then when something cool happens. As the yearly ritual progressses they start to become more and more familiar with it - by the time they're an adult, The Great Escape becomes a beloved childhood classic.

I cannot imagine any kid sitting through it

TBH I grew up with my dad's Super 8 digest of the movie, which stitched a narrative from the best 30 minutes. Then we got a video recorder and it seemed hells of long, but if I was off sick from school it was a great movie to drift in and out of on the sofa sickbed or, as Daniel suggests above, to have playing in the background while playing with toy soldiers.

I loved it as a kid too AND got my kids to watch it at some point, though I wouldn’t say they exactly loved it.

It's kinda dull as dirt, lol. I don't know who to blame for that, Sturges? The acting is all fine, give or take a wacky accent or affectation, but I'm struck by how a movie called "The Great Escape" could be so turgid. Or really falter at depicting the passage of time in general. It would be one thing if the film's length reflected the duration of the story, but the way it's told the prisoners might as well have been in there for days or weeks, not years. McQueen repeatedly gets locked in the cooler, that's his deal, but might have had more weight to it if we got a sense of its perils rather than as a place to bounce a ball off the wall, until he's let out again, smiling and clean-shaven. Or how Ives is bright and cocky, and then suddenly one scene announces he's about to crack. Just something that showed the POW camp wearing them (not us) down, a sense of urgency.

It is kind of remarkable how much of it I recognized from references in other movies and TV shows.

Fun fact from the wiki:

During filming, actor Donald Pleasence kindly offered advice to director John Sturges, to which he was politely asked to keep his "opinions" to himself. Later, when another actor on set informed Sturges that Pleasence was actually imprisoned in a German POW camp, Sturges requested his technical advice and input on historical accuracy from that point forward.

idk this movie makes sense as something kids would love, there's something about all the colorful characters and the process of the planning and tunneling which is just simply exciting and fun, especially if you're a kid who's ever dreamed of escaping from somewhere. i definitely don't turn to this film for psychological realism. it's just a classic entertainment, and i actually do find it vv entertaining, there aren't many slow bits.

one aspect i like, which maybe seemed fresher in 1963, is these US and British prisoners are happily engaged in the duty of the imprisoned soldier to attempt to escape, as the German commandant is reminded, thinking that it's almost just a game or part of the more honorable rules of warfare from another age, and then most of them run into the sadistic Gestapo crackdown rather than the ordinary German soldiers they expect will simply return them to their cells.

I did appreciate that aspect. I saw the movie summed up somewhere as part of the "war is fun" subgenre, but there is a glimmer of darkness there. I know the Steve McQueen character was more or less invented for the movie, but it would have been a similarly dark turn if, at the end, after all this chasing and bike jumps and whatever, when he pulls out his captain bars in a sort of chagrined "you got me" move, they just shot him, too. But this is not "Bonnie and Clyde."

I was also thinking of "Bridge Over the River Kwai" and other war films that focus on the officer POW experience and the irony of formalities and decorum in the midst of all the madness.

(Bridge On the River Kwai)

it's just a classic entertainment, and i actually do find it vv entertaining, there aren't many slow bits.

otm, "dull as dirt" is very weird to me — the part where they figure out how to get rid of the dirt rules!

One of many scenes referenced/ripped off all the time!

When was the last time any of you saw it start to finish? I mean, it's not a bad movie, still entertaining, but I literally just saw it Monday night, and zippy it is not.

there's something about all the colorful characters and the process of the planning and tunneling which is just simply exciting and fun

this! also, a bunch of em get killed, a real sense of jeopardy - who's gonna make it to the end??

I have the criterion blu-ray, so sometime in the past few years. I did see and enjoy it as an impressionable child (which is probably a factor), but not in the ways described above and it was in a mix with lots of other older movies from Hitchcock to Sound of Music to idk Herbie, so it never seemed particularly creaky to me.

xp yeah the big cast is crucial plus the classic heist/escape team thing of everyone finding their specialities, it planted a seed of eternally liking those kinds of films

John Leyton seems to be the only cast member still alive. He was 90 last month.

As a 9-year-old the deaths of so many of the characters was shocking, I think I just expected them to get away. I was especially upset with poor blind Donald Pleasance just wandering right into the line of fire. (Was also sort of amazed to learn that Pleasance actually was shot down during WWII and spent 7-8 months in a POW camp.)

something

I think that was it for me, really. There's a whole lot of "something" in the movie - the cast, the characters, the story - but the way it's executed is imo not as exciting and fun as I expected. That's why I mentioned it as an artifact of Old Hollywood. Just kind of stiff and old fashioned, which doesn't preclude fun and excitement, just hampers it. For some reason I kept thinking of a perpetual motion machine like "North By Northwest" while I watched it, and wondered what a director like Hitchcock might have done with the same story. Heck, imo Billy Wilder's own POW/escape/fun film a decade earlier does it a lot better/sharper.

The Time magazine reviewer wrote in 1963: "The use of color photography is unnecessary and jarring, but little else is wrong with this film. [...]".[67]

i probably saw this in the last few years as well and idk, it holds up for me. there are so many characters doing their thing that there's not a lot of slow spots and even when the movie pauses for a lark of a subplot, like the moonshine stuff, it's just leading into the discovery of a tunnel and Ives' fate, and that takes us into the final stretch.

otm re the dirt

i also remember as kid seeing The Great Escape II on TV, which was a miniseries starring Christopher Reeve, Judd Hirsch, Anthony Denison, and Ian McShane in the Richard Attenborough role. It was a retelling of the escape and followed up by telling the story of tracking down those responsible for executing fifty of the escapees. I don't remember if it was any good, but it seemed like exactly the kind of thing you'd see on TV in the '80s.

Lol at tagline

Seventy-six men escaped.
Fifty were executed.
Now three are back for revenge.

Iirc "The Great Escape II" is included in one of the recent 4k sets. Maybe the Arrow LE?

tbf i'd probably have a similar negative reaction if i saw it for the first time as a seasoned adult with actual expectations, but my experience of watching it as a bored kid on lazy afternoons conditioned me to enjoy it as more of a linklater-style hangout movie than any kind of an adventure or thriller. looking back now, i can see how sunday afternoon cable viewings of overlong hollywood fare from this era like this and Its A Mad Mad Mad Mad World taught me how to watch long slow movies, so i guess in a way i can thank them for my appreciation of Wiseman and Tarr

also yeah, as alluded to by rob above, its definitely not much slower/duller than other live action kiddie fare from the era, i've got no problems at all imagining mid-60s kids sitting through it

my hot take is that i never got what the big deal is with the motorcycle jump, its neat and all but idk why its considered a super famous stunt

is it that McQ did it himself? the build-up to it is fairly gripping iirc

is it because McQueen did it himself? (I can't remember) I think the only way in which I agree with Josh is that that sequence is definitely too long, and it's not as interesting/poignant as any of the other denouements iirc

xp!

on second thought, him getting slowly cornered is pretty good. hmm maybe I'll watch this today

McQueen apparently does all the filler motorcycle stuff, but a stuntman (Bug Ekins) did the jump. Which, tbh, after it happened I thought, OK, the big one must be coming up next. And I'd seen the jump before, lol!

McQueen wanted to do the big jump himself (and probably would've succeeded, he was no slouch) but the producers said no way

ha ok yeah I agree it's a bit anticlimactic, nowhere near as stomach-turning as that one guy getting tricked into speaking English ;_;

I actually liked all the motorcycle stuff, maybe because motorcycles are inherently exciting? I enjoyed all the denouements, actually, since having never seen the entire movie before I had no idea there was stuff after the escape! It was largely filmed on location, right? Hard to appreciate in the prison camp set, but sure easy to see when they're on the run.

The way the film opens up once they're out of the prison, both visually as you say and with the previously tightly coordinated team all diverging is a huge part of the appeal. I just remembered Coburn leisurely biking his way away, that one is awesome.

Speaking of Coburn, lots of great looks in this film. For a minute in college I desperately wanted to figure out how to get my hair to look like Ashley-Pitt's

otm, yeah its honestly really dynamic and cool to watch mcqueen zipping through those wide open fields filmed from really far away, certainly nowhere near how a scene like that would be filmed even like 5 years later. and its so poignant to see him slowly run out of options, processing the fact that his number's up, especially since he's the fun carefree coolguy character.

Speaking of Coburn, lots of great looks in this film.

"Corduroy, scrounged by Henley..."

the big jump isn't the most exciting part of the motorcycle stuff, its the chasing through German villages etc leading up to it

What this movie taught me is if I’m ever trying to escape the fascists, just stroll through the country or paddle down the river.

also, the production of bags and the sneaking of said bags into trouser legs will be of hitherto-unimaginable importance

it was in a mix with lots of other older movies from Hitchcock to Sound of Music to idk Herbie

Once you've tackled 60's live action Disney you've defeated the final boss of boring movies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hgHZtx1VQw

The grand takeaway, from personal experience and anecdote, is that children will literally watch anything rather than watch nothing.

lol what is that from Daniel?

Matinee, my second fave Joe Dante film (after Gremlins 2 of course.)

nice, never seen it

lol i was just googling around to find that but forgot it was a gag from Matinee, I thought I was going crazy, like "I know there's a 60s Disney shopping cart movie, I've seen it!"

lol I guess you didn't recognize Naomi Watts