The Great Escape

"What is aught, but as 'tis valued?" -William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

The widespread categorisation of The Great Escape as a war movie constitutes a misnomer almost as staggering as the film's title itself. If The Great Escape is about war, so are Casablanca, Forrest Gump and G.I. Blues; World War II is here a context for a storyline, scarcely even so much as a historical or cultural backdrop. The events in Stalag Luft North play themselves out in splendid isolation from the worldwide conflict which explains them, and are no convincing microcosm of the war as a whole- the POW camp is more like a boarding school than a stronghold of brutality and terror, the guards a paradigmatic mix of ruthlessly efficient Germans, comically inefficient Germans, and honorable, reluctant Germans. But the comfort in which the Allied prisoners are invited to sit out the remainder of the war serves to emphasise that there is nothing especially noble about escaping from misery, fear and pain, it is in what one is escaping to that, ultimately, the value of one's freedom is to be defined. The movie's most iconic figure, Virgil Hilts, is portrayed by Steve McQueen as the pure emanation of the spirit of self-governing autonomy, a rebel who already has a cause and doesn't need to define himself simply through opposition to authority. He is not merely a wild card, squeezed into the space between the German and British officers like the silhouette of a goblet between two white faces, but a discrete individual, capable of obeying codes but not of being subjugated by them. He is, of course, the movie's most significant figure without ever being its hero. The rest of the cast are equally excellent -James Coburn's ropy accent attracts critism, but does not detract from the movie- and token Scotsman Flying Officer Archibald Ives gives my hometown its only mention in high-profile cinema before killing himself in drunken desperation.

I can sympathise.

The great escape itself is, essentially, a glorification of man's willingness to struggle against near-impossible odds. Woo-hoo. So are Braveheart, The Karate Kid and Rocky IV. But what is telling about The Great Escape -particularly in light of its title and its reputation as a rip-roaring yarn of derring-do- is that it is a movie about near-impossible odds which actually do, as it happens, turn out to be near-impossible. Innured by the casual pace of the first half of the movie, we expect the conclusion to be a straightforward procession towards the freedom of all concerned; like an Indiana Jones movie, we are no longer interested in whether but in how. Inobstrusively, the setbacks to the POWs plans mount higher and higher until, with a start, we realise that events have become so poised as to require a stroke of absolutely massive deus ex machina arbitrariness if they are to fall in the escapees' favour. In the space of half-an-hour we move from complacent contemplation of a complete escape which is, surely, already in the offing to real dubiety as to whether the Allies will achieve even the marginal victory of a single successful flight from German-occupied territory. But, most significantly, the experience and excitement of the escapes is not negated by their eventual failure; the motorbike chase scenes are the most popularly-remembered moments in the movie, Hilts's eventual collision with the second barbed-wire fence failing to erase his spectacular leap over the first. Not the fruits of the experience -which we have slowly come to realise were out of reach from the very beginning- but the experience itself is the reward for endeavour, a realisation grimly counterpointed and challenged by the callous massacre of Bartlett and his officers as they discuss how worthwhile the exercise has been.

This juxtaposition is typical of The Great Escape, a movie which, like a stoic British officer being tortured by the Gestapo, refuses to tell us anything. Utterly refusing to commit itself either one way or the other on whether the sacrifice of those lives was worth the brief breath of suffocated freedom, The Great Escape is brutally honest in its evasion of absolutes; the tragedy of the piece is not the slaughter of the British officers, but the inability of Group Captain Ramsey to meet the tired, embittered Hendley's question about whether the deaths were worth it with anything other than a "Well, it all depends on your point of view". Last word follows on last word follows on last word, each contradicting the other; Hilts' return to the camp and installation in solitary with his baseball and glove is a reminder that life goes on and another smile is just around the corner, but is then overshadowed by the poignant dedication of the movie to the murdered officers whose real-life escape formed the basis of the movie. Like existence itself, The Great Escape refuses to be drawn, turning the skin-crawling responsibility of interpretation finally to its audience with a reminder that even matters of life and death all depend on your point of view.