This was cinema as history, and history through cinema. Although the characters are composites of real men, and time and place have been compressed, every detail of the escape is the way it really happened.” To the younger viewer, such text would carry authority and the weight of authenticity: How could one doubt the claim to veracity? Strikingly, a number of my correspondents who saw the film in adolescence as I did found its impact heightened by an opening text just after the credits that asserted: “This is a true story. I found overwhelmingly that my experience was similar to theirs: We had expected a Hollywood film of moral clarity and rousing commitment and had been bewildered, even affected in a woundingly emotional way, by this film that veered into despair and deflation. Yet I’d long been aware of the film, or at least of what I imagined the film to be as promoted in its iconic poster - men fleeing from background to foreground under words that promised “The great adventure! The great entertainment! The Great Escape” - and all that buoyant spirit readily appealed to me as a typical American boy of the times for whom war was (still) imagined as great and grand enterprise.įor the book, I interviewed by email several military aficionados and film scholars about their first memories of the film.
The film came out in 1963 so my viewing must have been of a re-release following its first run. My newly published book, Dreams of Flight: The Great Escape in American Film and Culture, just out from the University of California Press, stands as the culmination of my engagement with the film and its history over the years.
Its turn from gung-ho romp to downbeat fatalism was something I hadn’t anticipated, and the film remained with me as something to come to grips with. I was around 12 or 13, and the film blew me away. I first saw The Great Escape at my local drive-in in the mid-1960s. (Image source: ) “It can be illuminating to unpack the process by which what ‘really happened’ in 1944 became a fictional film in 1963.” Captain Virgil ‘The Cooler King’ Hilts (Steve McQueen) makes a daring bid for freedom on a stolen motorcycle during the final moments of The Great Escape.
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