The New Year's resolution did not last long, ay?
It is almost a truism in the UK to state: 'It's Christmas, it must be time for 'The Great Escape', such was, and probably still is, the pervasive nature of the film at Christmastide ever since it was first released to TV sometime in the late-sixties. (I am assuming that the 'five-year-rule' applied during the nineteen sixties where studios or distributors would not allow a film to be shown on TV until five years had elapsed from its cinematic release; the bargaining power of the cable and satellite channels has laid that bizarre practice firmly to rest) I, personally, have seen it so many times, beyond my ability to remember, that I could probably write the script from memory and yet it seldom irritates or grates.
In many ways, it has always puzzled me why the makers of the film, or the script-writers, chose to mix fiction in with the fact; the escapade was quite thrilling enough without the 'added' bonuses; as the memory of the event in 1944 recedes into the murky waters of the past, it must surely become more difficult for current generations to separate the truth from the fantasy. This not only demeans the truly remarkable achievement of the mass break-out but also, in my mind, undercuts the film itself in significant ways.
It is easy to understand the rationale which lay behind the 'pièce de resistance' of the film; Steve McQueen's glorious bike ride to the Swiss frontier, in which he performed all of his own stunts except for the most spectacular one; where he 'vaults' the first wire. After all, he was the 'star', whatever Dickie Attenborough might have thought, and a film in which McQueen simply pitches a baseball against the 'cooler' wall in scene after scene would have been unlikely to have attracted a star who wanted to be an even bigger star even if it meant complete fabrication to achieve it. It is a tad galling to me, as a Brit, that an American should get the plum role, the more so as there were no Americans whatsoever in the camp, Stalag Luft III, in 1943 when the tunnel was first envisaged. However, I cannot fathom the reasoning behind Garner's and Pleasance's attempted escape by plane except that in a war film you had to have an aeroplane somewhere even if it had no basis in fact; shades of the Dam Busters! Nor is it clear why Charles Bronson had to have a merry punt down the river and into the Baltic Sea.
'Faction' or fact-based fiction has been a staple of literature for as long as peoples have written history, real or feigned. However, in literature, the authors usually 'fess up' and the publisher invariably categorises highly fictionalised accounts of historical events or people as fiction when there is any hint of an informed, or ignorant, view which is founded on idle speculation or merely dramatic effect; I doubt that anyone would view the historical plays of Shakespeare or Hochhuth's 'Der Stellvertreter' as pure history. However, and perhaps it is just me, film is either fiction, whether based on a true story or not or a 'documentary-style' fact based movie, even when the facts are presented in an overtly personal style or 'Weltanschaung'.
'The Great Escape' is riddled with fabrication and that may be to the betterment of the 'film as film' but the danger is that the facts are confused with the invention in such a way as to make the very real achievements of the prisoners pass into the realms of fantasy; the prisoners really did have a miniature 'railway' to remove the sand from the tunnel; they really did have an improvised and manual 'air conditioner' to remove stale air from the tunnel; they really did make their own radios from bits of junk; every document that was required for travel in wartime, Nazi Germany really was generated by hand; every piece of civilian clothing was made by cannibalising old, and not so old, air force uniforms; the Germans really did 'murder' over 50 of the escapees in cold blood and contrary to the Geneva Convention, although not in the manner that was presented in the film, they were shot wherever they happened to be found usually in ones or twos*; the 'Bartlett' character really was given away by his companion answering in English to a question phrased in English by a suspicious Gestapo official but a few miles from the French border and comparative safety.
The glorious ingenuity of the prisoners, under the ever watchful eye of their captors beggars belief. 'The Great Escape' aside, the French plan to tunnel through the bedrock of 'escape-proof' Colditz castle with the simplest of 'home-made' tools and to release the entire contingent of French POWs (about 200) in one night was only foiled at the eleventh hour by the discovery of the tunnel mere metres from the wire which surrounded the castle; the Dutch practice at Colditz and the British practice at Marlag O of creating mannequins to substitute for escapees at the all too present 'roll-call' and thus delay the discovery of the escape; the British at Stalag Luft III, the same camp as 'the Great Escape but six months earlier, who used tunnellers hidden inside a wooden vaulting horse to markedly reduce the distance of the tunnel. And perhaps the most audacious of any escape attempt, dreamt up by a Brit, naturally (!), of using a glider made of wood and bed linen, flown from the roof of the castle, to ferry two escapees beyond the wire and out into the farmland beyond!
Sadly, the castle was liberated before the flight took place, however a recent reconstruction by the UK's Channel 4, who built a replica in the same attic used by the prisoners and working to the same plans as the prisoners, demonstrated that it would have indeed worked; it really did glide as a glider should. Fortunately for the prisoners, a well stocked library included a two volume tome on the principles of aircraft design!
I sometimes wonder in idle moments exactly what the POWs would have got up to if incarcerated in a conventional, modern-day prison"
* The tale of the hunting down of those responsible, from Saarbrucken to Kiel and all points in-between, is a tale in itself, best reserved for another post.
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