It's not easy being part of the holy trinity of Bank Holiday movies. Endless repeat telly showings of The Great Escape (like The Wizard Of Oz and The Sound Of Music) mean that John Sturges' 1963 film is treated with the air of casual contempt that only excessive familiarity can breed. "Bloody hell!" people bleat. "Not this old rubbish again." A million remote buttons click and the audience figures for Beadles' Funniest Road Fatalities and I Love 20 Minutes Ago sky rockets...
The reality is that The Great Escape is belting Hollywood entertainment. The attempt to dig 250 men out of a German Prisoner Of War camp has everything: drama, conflict, a smattering of laughs, a bucketload of bitter irony and some unavoidable tragedy.
Sturges draws memorable turns from his Magnificent Seven trio of McQueen, James Coburn and Charles Bronson (bolstered by James Garner's laconic scrounger), mixes in a host of quality British faces from Richard Attenborough on down, and simply lets the set-pieces roll. Smack Elmer Bernstein's thumpingly-hummable terrace anthem over the top and you've got a movie for any day of the year.
DVD Extras:
Cast and crew commentary, trivia track, The Untold Story, Heroes Underground and A Man Called Jones: The Real Virgil Hilts documentaries, additional Untold Story interviews, picture gallery, trailer.The shock here is how close to reality the film actually is. The Untold Story is a reconstruction-heavy Granada documentary about the real-life escape and it pounds home the fact that the bulk of the film's details are spot on, from the technicalities of hiding the dirt to the way 50 of the 76 escapers really were executed (the orders for the killings came direct from Adolf Hitler himself).Of course, Hollywood liberties are taken. As the commentary and Heroes Underground reveal, the American involvement had to be cranked up to guarantee bums on seats in Idaho (US airmen did help dig the tunnels, but were moved to a different camp before the actual breakout). McQueen's two-wheeled barbed wire jump was pure invention (he only signed on after the producers promised he could show off his driving skills), but The Real Virgil Hilts documentary is still entertaining. The life story of US airman Davey Jones, it's an astonishing doc about one of the camps' POWs, a man who flew in the Doolittle raid on Tokyo before capture and later went on to pilot nuclear bombers and work for NASA on the moon landings.More on the film's stars to balance the real-life revelations would have been good, but what's here is still well worth digging out. Especially if you go for the World Cup Edition, which comes with an England flag, Umbro adverts and a mini-doc crammed with football memories - all for just an extra £3.
