Author
and film historian Dana Polan has
recently written a book titled Dreams of
Flight: ‘The Great Escape’ in American Film and Culture that analyzes
director John Sturges’ WWII classic. Cinema Retro Editor-in-Chief Lee Pfeiffer conducted this interview with
Polan regarding his book.
Q:Tell us about your book overall:
Dana Polan: Combining unique
archival research, close analysis, and first-person accounts by viewers, Dreams
of Flight traces multiple histories around the 1963 POW classic The
Great Escape: production history of the film itself but also the history of
the original event (an actual breakout in 1944 that led to the successful
escape of three men, recapture of seventy-three with fifty of those summarily
executed on Hitler’s orders), as well as the trajectory of POW Paul Brickhill’s
written account as it evolved into the bestselling page-turner book The
Great Escape. I also chronicle my own viewing history of the film, starting
as a Sixties adolescent, along with accounts by other viewers who also saw the
film around then and found that its blend of the buoyant and the downbeat
stayed with them over the years. I had long wanted to revisit the film, ever
since first seeing and being so strongly impacted by it. I feel so lucky to
have been given the chance to engage with the film in a book-length study that
could go into much detail about the film and its reception history.
Q:When and where did you first see the film?
DP: I wish I could be
more precise about the exact date but I started researching and writing the
book during Covid quarantine and that limited a wee bit of my research. I know
I saw it at my town’s one drive-in and it was likely about 1965 since that is
when we moved to the area. If so, I would have been 13 years old or so, and it
would have been a re-release. I’d have loved to track down microfilm copies of
the local newspaper to see the dates the film was playing and also to determine
if it was on a double-bill or not. The Great Escape is a long film but
our drive-in generally showed two films and I imagine would only have had one
presentation per night of the double-bill. Although The Great Escape was
not road-showed in its original release in 1963 — no symphonic overture over a
static opening title, no intermission, and so on — I persist in thinking there
was a break half-way through so viewers could be encouraged to go to the
concession stand. In fact, the film has a logical place for a pause just at the
halfway mark — when the first character we care about gets killed and the hitherto
individualist Hilts (Steve McQueen) declares his commitment to the collective
cause of escape. There’s a consequential fade-out and then fade-in as the POWs
resolutely return to their cause. If indeed the drive-in showed The Great
Escape on a double-bill, that would have made for a long evening, and the
intermission might have been essential for concession-stand sales.
An
amusing anecdotal detail: I was away for the weekend when the film opened at
the drive-in and my mom and stepdad went without me on Saturday evening
to see it. I had desperately been wanting to see it as, as I’ll explain in a
moment, it seemed to promise exactly that sort of action entertainment I loved
as a kid. When I got home by Sunday, I was so distraught that they hadn’t
waited that my stepdad ended up having to take me that evening and sat through
this long epic a second time in two days. He dozed off here or there while I
was enthralled by every moment of the film even as I ultimately found it very
disturbing.
Q:What impressed you most about it?
DP: Like, I imagine,
many young American boys of the time, I went to the film for the gungho promise
of its canonic poster, “The great adventure, the great entertainment, the great
escape.” Instead, I was blown away by a narrative that seemed to me to be a
deflation of adventure — a transformation of rousing entertainment into
something questioning and quite bleak.
The
Great Escape’s
downbeat turn from a fun romp into fatalism left a lasting impression on me. As
I write in Dreams of Flight, this unexpected narrative turn was a theme
I began to notice in other films of that historical moment — one that is
telling of American culture in the 1960s.
I
have always imagined that my experience of movies is not mine alone but is
likely representative of my demographic currents (gungho adolescent boy, in
this case) and may be shared strongly by others in the same demographic. At the
time, as I say, I was a pre-teen American boy who especially liked “manly”
action cinema and expected from the trailers and that iconic poster that The
Great Escape fit that mold. I know from other fan accounts that I tracked down
for the book that I was not alone in feeling something disturbing and
consequential was going on instead — in the film and in the times themselves.
In my research for Dreams of Flight, I reached out to other viewers who
first saw The Great Escape in the 1960s and found many had comparable
reactions.
(Photo: Courtesy of the author.)
Q:Where does it stand in relation to Sturges' other films?
DP: John Sturges made
over 40 films in a career that started with B-movies with a graduation to A-films
in the 1950s, some of which combined strong narrative drive with a degree of
artistic ambition — on the one hand, an entrapment drama like Bad Day at
Black Rock (Sturges’s one nomination for Best Director) where thematic
resonance (the topic of racial prejudice) is overlaid with taut suspense and
moments of explosive action; on the other hand, the pretention of literary adaptation
with, for example, the barebones Hemingwayesque allegory of The Old Man and
the Sea. Even though he was thought of most as a manly man’s director,
Sturges even did so-called women’s films, melodramas of love and emotional
turmoil, such as A Girl Named Tamiko or By Love Possessed. But
his forte was films of masculine fortitude and he found apt embodiment,
literally so, for the trials and travails of men under pressure in a visual
fascination with strong, sometimes stocky guys filmed as upright or coiled up bundles
of vitality just itching to burst out. For example, the first time we see James
Garner in The Great Escape (as Hendley, the forger), he’s filmed,
perhaps curiously, from a distance that not only cuts off his feet but hisneck and head as well so that the emphasis is on his torso, taut and
tough as he confronts the fact of incarceration. Throughout the film, there are
long pauses to paint a pent-up male energy that then passes over into scenes of
vibrant action. I suggest in my book that The Great Escape not merely
divides into three parts — planning of the escape, enactment of the escape, the
outcome (as noted, a generally bleak one with most of the men rounded up and
summarily executed) — but finds an overall distinct visual style for each of
these: from coiled up men constrained by the fences that surround the camp and
by the very confinement of the barracks they are walled up in, to the open
expanses of seeming freedom beyond the camp, and back again to the camp for
those POWs who are rounded up but escape execution (with the last shots showing
even greater confinement for Hilts, who once again merits his moniker, “The
Cooler King”).
For
me, The Great Escape shows Sturges at the pinnacle of his dramatic form,
although some fans prefer the tighter professionalism of The Magnificent
Seven. Later Sturges films have their moments but the pauses get longer
(and more talky as in the very sodden The Satan Bug) and the
professionalism turns into long scenes of planning for action that actually
defer that action (for example, the slowly unfolding Marooned and the
overblown Ice Station Zebra which keeps delaying a violent confrontation
that actually never comes for symphonically scored scenes of the submarine
crashing through the ice and men pushing buttons and yelling orders). I find
perfection to the pacing of The Great Escape: men talk out their plans
at length but the suspense never lets up and, as I argue in the book, Sturges
films dialogue scenes in a variety of forms (classic shot/reverse shot,
wide-screen confrontation between men, long takes with a moving camera, and so
on) that keep everything moving forward in thrilling fashion.
Q:Can you discuss how Steve McQueen ended up chasing himself on the
motorcycle?
It’s
a great question but before getting to it, I want to reiterate something I said
above — Sturges’s preoccupation with male bodies. Sturges is a director both of
manly deliberation (here, the planning that goes into the escape, the scheming
and verbal jousting with the Nazis) and of the ways that deliberation
passes over into action – in this case, the escape preparations and then the
escape itself.
In
this respect, it matters to The Great Escape, obviously in a pre-CGI
period, that we see real male bodies on display (for example, a shirtless and
buff Charles Bronson), bodies on the line (literally so in several shots that
show these manly men lined up in partnership, as in the first shot of buddies
Willy [John Leyton] and Danny [Bronson] as they stroll forward, side by side,
to contemplate the digging they’ll have to do to tunnel out of the camp). There
is a lineage to draw between the action stars of The Great Escape and
later ones who, even in the CGI moment, insist on doing their own stunts or
showing off their bodies for both the prowess they demonstrate and the quite
corporeal lashings they receive (for example, the battered body of Bruce Willis
in Die Hard who becomes more and more shirtless but also more bruised as
the narrative progresses).
Hilts’s
jump on his motorcycle over a barbed wire fence in The Great Escape is
rightly considered by many fans to be the high point of the film and is an
iconic moment from the history of action cinema. It matters that it’s done in
real time and with no evident trickery. Over the years, it became increasingly
known that McQueen didn’t do the leap himself (it seems that insurance wouldn’t
cover such a risk to such an actor) but his stunt double Bud Ekins. However — and
it’s always hard to separate mythifying from fact in regards to Hollywood cinema
— witnesses to the scene claim that McQueen (and other actors from the film, in
fact) did the jump when the cameras weren’t rolling, just to prove they could.
Whoever actually did the stunt, it’s the fact that it actually was done that is
so thrilling.
McQueen
was an ace master of high-velocity vehicles and couldn’t keep from speeding
around, on set and behind the scenes, during the filming of The Great Escape.
(Evidently, the German police had orders to keep an eye out for him racing up
and down the autobahn during the on-location shoot.) When the production team
was planning out the motorcycle chase, McQueen offered in the alternating shots
to play not only Hilts but one of the Nazis in pursuit. So even though he
didn’t get to jump the barbed wire on-film, he got a lot of live-action with
minimal effects (no dummies used) and with real bodies always in play!
Q:The actual escape involved only British POWs (along with some Europeans
– Poles, for instance) but distributor United Artists and producer The Mirisch Company
wanted American star power. Do you think the historical distortion, which upset
British veterans of the escape, diminishes its legacy in any way?
DP:
This is a really important question but not to be coy about it, it’s one that I
want to remain agnostic about. In the book, I devote a long Appendix to tracing
out the real history of the escape and what changed as it turned into a
star-driven epic. Some changes are no doubt consequential, some are likely
minor in impact, but I really want to leave it up to the reader to decide what
to make of the changes. The original story is amazing; the film, in my view, is
amazing in its own cinematic right but in often divergent ways from the
historical record.
I
talked by e-mail with a number of armchair military historians (for the Second
World War, they are legion — and there are two very active listserves devoted
just to Stalag Luft 3, where the escape took place). A very few of these
historians excoriate the film while most either see it as a thing apart, to be
consumed in its own right and to be judged in entertainment terms above all, or
they accept that a filmic rendition of the escape could likely only have come
to fruition with Hollywood money behind it — and Hollywood stars in it. A
number of armchair historians came to Paul Brickhill’s book from liking the
film and they clearly maintain a fondness for the latter. Interestingly, there
are also cases of survivor POWs who found that whether accurate or not to the
specific facts of the actual escape, the film was realistic enough to bring
back post-traumatic memories of their time in the camps. One book on the escape
mentions in this regard the interesting case of a Stalag Luft 3 survivor who
found the film too emotionally devastating for him to watch and preferred
instead the unreal antics of TV’s Hogan’s Heroes whereas we might have
expected veterans of POW incarceration to find the CBS series a flip, even
immoral betrayal of what the camps meant in modern times and said about the
evils in modern history.
Q:The film has a standout cast of actors who would emerge as major stars
in the 1960s: Bronson, Coburn, Pleasence, McCallum, Garner, etc. Is there a
particular supporting performance that most impresses you?
DP:
As I say in the book, I think the many actors of The Great Escape are
often at the top of their game in this film. On the one hand, they each have
loner moments that show off just how good they are; on the other hand, and this
is in keeping with the themes of the film itself, they work well together as an
ensemble. This is a film about men who go their own ways — into their named
specializations while planning the escape (Scrounger, Forger, Tunnel King, etc.),
onto their hoped-for path to freedom once they escape; but the film also
centrally focuses on the need to be a team and work together for the common
good. Every actor, I think, hits the mark on both sides of the equation.
Q:You talked at the beginning of this interview about your book as
entailing inquiry into multiple histories around the film. Was there any
research find for you that was unique and that you are particularly happy
about?
DP:
I’m very proud of two allied discoveries during the course of my research that
themselves had little to do directly with the 1963 film as an adaptation of
Paul Brickhill’s book. One biography of Brickhill alluded in passing to an
earlier television adaptation and a multi-part radio version but assumed that
both were lost to time. But I was able to locate both: Australia’s national
radio and broadcast archive had tapes of the radio episodes and were able to
send me MP3s of them, and I uncovered a catalogue citation for a 16mm. print of
the television show in the collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society
Archives, literally by pure coincidence just as I was about to take up a
one-week visiting professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where
the Archives are. They were able to digitize the film and have it ready for my
examination. I was in Madison in that visiting professorship the last week of
February 2020, just days before COVID quarantine, and feel so lucky to have
gotten the chance to see the teleplay multiple times before everything shut
down. This adaptation is really interesting. Everett Sloane (most known as
Bernstein from Citizen Kane) puts on a British accent to play Roger
Bushell, mastermind of the “great escape,” and the show takes place veritably
in real time as the prisoners get their tunnel ready for escape, distract the
Nazis, talk about their mission, and then go through with it. An epilogue
voice-over tells of the Nazis’ execution of the Fifty chosen to die. Most
striking is the set for the teleplay: the biggest décor built at NBC up to that
time, it has cutaway barracks, a marching ground, the barbed wire that
surrounds the camp, the woods beyond which were imagined by the POWs to be a
path to freedom, all of this on a raised platform with a cutaway tunnel along its
edge (raised so that the cameras could be level with the tunnel, not looking
down at it). It was so fascinating to me to see this other version of the story
as well as hear the radio show’s take and realize how the story of The Great
Escape could be told again and again with new inflections and artistic
resonances.
Q:Why has the movie's legacy endured for so many decades?
DP: The Great Escape epitomizes
at first glance a golden Hollywood of action entertainment. With its ensemble
cast efforts — combined with stand-out stars like Steve McQueen — high
production values, and adept crafting of nail-biting suspense, The
Great Escape might well seem like a well-crafted film rich in the
qualities that those who are nostalgic for an older Hollywood refer to
wistfully as “the kind of picture they just don’t make any more.” But it also
is arguably very much a Sixties film — with all the doubts, tensions,
contradictions that characterize that period. As a last gasp of the old
Hollywood, The Great Escape references a tradition of consummate
escapism but it is very downbeat and un-escapist, both metaphorically and
literally, in its overall take on history and masculine endeavor.
Three
years into that fraught decade that was the 1960s, The Great Escape already
evinces some of that despair about — and even downright questioning of – the
adventure of war that would run through the period. In the 1960s, the idea of
the human condition itself as a sort of entrapment or imprisonment is quite
common in popular (and high) culture. So, although The Great Escape is
in many ways a throwback to rip-roaring adventure of the traditional sort, it
also has strong moments of bitter recognition of the walls that hold us in, of
the fences that hold us in. Entrapment, and the quest to escape it, is such a
resonant theme.
I
wrote my manuscript while hunkering down during the Covid-19 pandemic, and I
was struck continually by the extent to which themes of escape ran through
popular media in such a fraught moment. As I worked on the book, I watched us
live through enforced restrictions (of body, of spirit) that was met often by a
resilient insistence by many people that they’d really, really like to get out,
get away, get to a new normal — or use the crisis to rebuild life in new,
responsive ways. And there’s also been a new concern by many of those in
quarantine to turn to culture (books, films, television shows, etc.) for what
is often pointedly termed “escapism.” In all this, The Great
Escape lingers for me, and for other fans who talked to me about it,
as a memory but also an ongoing preoccupation, a consummate work of popular
entertainment that digs deeply into resonant cultural motifs.