April 17, 2008

The Great Escape - "Don't Play Chess With A Nazi"

The Great Escape (1963)


K: I really "dig" movies where there's an all male cast. You don't have to go through the romantic storyline and sometimes that gets in the way of the story in movies like this, which is one of camaraderie.

H: It can get in the way because writers feel the need to inject it where it doesn't have a place.

K: And it doesn't have a place here. Only motorcycles have a place in this movie.

H: Does your fondness apply to all female casts as well?

K: With all female casts, they still have a romantic interest that they ditched or one that they're striving for. In this movie, the guys didn't even say things like "This is the wife/girlfriend I left behind."

H: This movie is pretty sexless.

This movie fits into the whole escape of the POW tradition, like Stalag 17 (1953). Later movies also draw on this one.

K: This movie wasn't about the conditions of the prison, though. Most movies like this are.

H: Yeah, because the prison was really nice. It was brand new.

K: It was the game of it.

H: Yeah, they weren't trying to escape because they couldn't stand the prison. Most of them were escaping to serve a purpose, which was to confuse the Germans.

K: Do they achieve that purpose?

H: Yes. You see the extreme lengths the Germans go to to capture all of them. They all split up and they all get caught. You don't see the larger effects of people running away from the front to find them, but you know there was considerable manpower behind that effort. Building that prison to hold all of the best escapists took a lot of effort. That alone is testament to how much they were confounding the enemy.

At the same time, they all thought they'd get away and keep fighting, but they died.

K: I wonder how much they thought that.

H: They did think of themselves as smarter than the Germans.

K: There's a hope for it, but these guys have a realistic side to them.

H: Those who didn't escape were pretty surprised that fifty of the escapees got shot.

K: They were surprised that they got shot, not that they didn't get away. I don't think they thought of getting caught as a very serious thing.

H: They thought it was a game.

K: It's like if I were playing chess with you and I cheated a little bit and you pulled out a gun.

H: Well, don't play chess with a Nazi. What did you think about the scene where the Big X had been rounded up with everyone and they got out of the trailer to rest and he said, "This is the best day of my life" or something to that effect? Then you see that big machine gun and there's the sky behind them.

Was escaping from that prison the culmination of human achievement for them? What did their escape represent, not to the Germans or the war effort, but in human terms?

K: It has a lot to do with the strength of will, that no matter what the conditions are...he knew his consequence. Do you think other people knew that the Big X faced execution if he were caught again?

H: No, everyone figured they'd just return to the prison. Steve McQueen's character got caught 17 times trying to escape, so I don't think anyone realized the consequences for the Big X or for themselves.

It's interesting that you'd phrase it that way, as "strength of will". It reminds me of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935). Really you could see this movie representing the pure will of the Americans versus the violent, dangerous will of the Nazis. Two competing visions. Notice how, for the most part, the Americans don't seem interested in killing any of the Germans.


K: The idea of the sky being big and the field being big shows us that they're just small figures in this big war.

H: But you see the figures big against the sky, they're not small. So this magnifies their effect in the larger scheme of the war. It's not as in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), where people are always depicted as small when compared with the environment, showing us how inconsequential the Arab revolt was compared with the war at large and the issues to plague the Middle East in the future.

I think you're right about the whole "whatever it takes". In the scene where the Big X is first proposing that 250 men should try to escape, at first the men tasked with various things like making civilian clothes or documents gape at their assignments but then quickly say something to the effect of "we'll make the impossible happen". That was everybody's attitude. No one said no, except for Steve McQueen's character and even he bowed to the ludicrous vision. It was the strength of the vision that kept people going.

K: McQueen's character's mantra was "I'll do it on my own", but when the Scottish guy needed help he said, "Well, I'll help him." That's how he got sucked in.

H: He needed to see his role in individual terms. If it's one person he can help, yes. If it's fifty people...

That was really America's and Western Europe's attitude towards what the Nazis were doing. They were hesitant to get involved because they failed to see the suffering of the Jews, Poles, etc in human terms.

K: Is this a true adventure film or is it more of a thriller? How would you classify it? This movie has an obvious division - a prison part and an escape part. The prison part feels like a psychological thriller. How do you get 250 men out of the prison? They're always in danger of being caught. The escape part feels like an action movie. There's a motorcycle scene, people are in a plane, on a train - every mode of transportation is used (except a camel). It's like It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) in that respect and where everyone has the same goal.

H: I saw the same division but for a different reason. The prison part is jolly and hopeful. Everyone's having a good time scheming against the Germans, being thrown in the cooler isn't a problem, and your baseball mitt's waiting for you when you get caught and returned to your bunk house.

K: Did you know who was going to get caught? Did you think they would get caught? The realist in me thought they would get caught, but I still had hope for them.

H: So that gets to the second part of the movie, where things go horribly wrong. The jolliness and the hope ends when that one guy pops his head up out of the hole when the guards are looking his way. That's when my optimism deflated, but until that point I was as hopeful as the prisoners. Their vision drew me in. The escape part, though, feels doomed, although I had hope when the resistance in France gunned down those Nazis at the cafe. This movie surely isn't Indiana Jones, where one man can defeat the Third Reich and find biblical relics. The movie was noticeably absent of the chaplain type character, like in M.A.S.H. (1972-1983). Who do you think is Radar in this movie?

K: Even in prison, it's nice that everyone has a role in the escape. Everyone has a job and they're needed in the world. That's the kind of world I want to live in.

1 comment:

Kathleen said...

You two are traveling on a wonderful journey & I'm glad to be part of it. Do you know that I took one of my classes in art as the History of Film in College (the first time}? I loved it!