Movie Minx

Starring: Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough, James Garner, Charles Bronson
Directed by: John Sturges

Plot: A German POW camp houses some of the war’s most skilled escape artists. Not prone to twiddling their thumbs, several hundred hatch a plot to break free.

But is it any good?

I was watching the opening credits of The Great Escape when it hit me – The Simpsons. This has happened a lot since I’ve been making my way through the Top 100. I get déjà vu because I’ve watched an episode of The Simpsons, seen a nod to a famous film and just didn’t get it. This time I remembered the scene where Maggie’s at a playcentre and the mean woman in charge has confiscated all their toys. So Maggie constructs an elaborate plan to get their stuff back, it works and when the rest of the family comes to pick Maggie up they encounter the deafening sound of a hundred dummies/pacifiers being sucked at once. They take Maggie and slowly back out (that’s a reference to The Birds, right?).

The trigger this time was the music, that jaunty tune that seems far too cheerful to be in a POW movie, although this has elements of hijinx and jocularity all through it. You almost expect Colonel Klink to walk onto the set.

The ridiculousness is heightened when the POWs learn a bit of German so they can pass as Germans when they get out. Now, I speak a lot of German and I was watching this with a German friend. Just because you can say your name and something like, “I’m German, not English” does not qualify you as a native speaker. The German exchanges were not subtitled, and if they had been in, say, Russian, I may have been more impressed. This isn’t a complaint exactly, in fact it added unintentional comedic value – particularly when they featured the “Australian” prisoner whose accent is not from any country I’m familiar with.

But of course the story isn’t ridiculous - this escape really did happen. True, the characters are completely stereotyped, but the general plot is accurate. The camp housed some of the war’s most skilled escape artists and they did construct an extremely efficient tunnel under the German guards’ noses. They orchestrated a bloody clever system so they could get out and do their bit for the war effort (plus, crucially, they distracted thousands of German troops from the D-Day battle) and it makes you root for them all through the film.

I hadn’t given the movie much thought before I saw it and assumed once they were out of the prison that would be it, but of course they had to cross the German border as well - which all in all makes the film nearly three hours long. It does lag in parts, but the suspense sees you through – how many, if any, will make it? A cast of stars also helps to carry the film, including Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Garner and Richard Attenborough. McQueen’s fast-paced motorcycle jump over the barbed wire with half the German army on his heels is particularly thrilling.

That defiance (and prisoner solidarity) also helps stick it to the Germans, as symbolised by McQueen’s baseball which he casually throws at the wall to pass time whenever he’s put back in the ‘cooler’. The Yanks make their independence and high sprits (or show of them) clear, from making their own moonshine and beating drums on the 4th of July to informing the Brits that the colonies are doing “just fine, thank you”.

I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say there are a few deaths – after all, this was the Second World War. Which in some ways makes it hard to sympathise fully with these Allies when you put the drama in context. Their camp is a hell of a lot nicer than the ones I was forced to spend a few summers at, the German guards are remarkably tolerant of these cocky troops who keep defying them and – well, it was the WAR, for heaven’s sake, and far more atrocious things happened than anything we see in this film (I visited Dachau last year, which makes this movie look like a trip to Disneyland by comparison). So while I admired their ingenuity and pluckiness, and the escape became a wild ride of adventure, I felt only slightly more engaged than I would have sitting through an episode of Hogan’s Heroes.

IMDb’s rating: 8.3/10
My rating: 7/10

Next movie to be reviewed: La vita e bella (Life is Beautiful)

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