The Great Escape (1963)
Friday, September 2nd, 2005One has to ask some very strange things in the job I have.
The Great Escape is a featherweight escapist entertainment (pardon the pun) disguised as a true story. While the basic facts of the story are faithful to real events, great liberties are also taken, mostly to make the film more appealing to American audiences. Even though the real event involved only British prisoners, the producers added James Garner and Steve McQueen to the cast. Garner plays Hendley, “The Scrounger”, an American who, based on his uniform, appears to fly for the Brits. It happened so that’s not too far fetched. McQueen is Hilts, “The Cooler King”, a character who spends most of his time locked in solitary confinement for his repeated escape attempts. His isolation from the rest of the characters, both before and after the titular escape, means that McQueen is almost in a completely different movie, all by himself.
