a blockbuster of almost 3 hours which was a huge success with the public – Corriere.it

On June 20, 1963 (the film will then be released in American theaters two weeks later and in ours at the end of August of that year) the world premiere of “The Great Escape”, a blockbuster for almost three hours, was held in London (but with a limited budget: “only” four million dollars at the time) by director John Sturges who three years after “The Magnificent Seven” expanded, resumed and relaunched the narrative mechanism of that great success (the union of desperate individuals in the name of a common goal) by entrusting the screenwriters James Clavell and WR Burnett with the adaptation of the homonymous – and autobiographical – novel by Australian driver John Brickhill. True story.

In 1943, after his plane was shot down by the Germans, Brickhill was in fact taken to a stalag where he was able to witness firsthand the attempted escape of over two hundred inmates who organized their escape by simultaneously digging three underground tunnels. Only seventy-five people managed to escape, two-thirds of whom were captured and killed (in spite of the Geneva Convention). In fiction, the year 1942, the Nazi colonel von Luger (Hannes Messemer, whom Rossellini had already used similarly in two consecutive films, “General Della Rovere”, 1959, and “It was night in Rome”, 1960) leads a group of prisoners British in the Luft III camp, already used for the confinement of several other particularly “exuberant” prisoners, where he takes care that the guests are treated with greater humanity to discourage the recurrence of other possible escape attempts. Among them, however, there is the squadron commander Roger Bartlett known as X1 (Richard Attenborough), who with the officer Ramsey (James Donald) is already planning a daring and massive escape attempt, with the aim of distracting large troops from the front enemies, based on the clandestine construction of three underground tunnels.

The plan is meticulously organized thanks to the identification of many other key figures, including squadron lieutenants Velinski (Charles Bronson), Hendley (James Garner), Blythe (Donald Pleasence) and second lieutenant Sedgwick (James Coburn); and the project quickly takes shape. During the festivities organized by American prisoners to celebrate Independence Day, one of the three escape tunnels already built is however discovered by the Nazi guards, just when the American captain Virgil Hilts (Steve McQueen), who was thinking of trying to escape in solitary, decides to put herself at the service of the organization after the Germans have murdered the Scottish recluse of her friend, Archibald Ives (Angus Lennie). Some time later, everything will be ready for the massive escape: but only a small part of the more than two hundred and fifty participants will be able to get away from the stalag, hunted down immediately after by the joint forces of the Wehrmacht and Gestapo who will start a gigantic manhunt.

By director Sturges’ own admission, at the time already a veteran with over twenty films under his belt (among which, in addition to the aforementioned “The Magnificent Seven”, the beautiful and epic westerns “The Siege of the Seven Arrows / Escape from Fort Bravo”, 1953, and “Gunfight at the OK Corral”, 1957, as well as the Hemingway adaptation “The Old Man and the Sea”, 1959), the matrices of “The Great Escape” were high . Indeed, his ambitions were to set in a context deriving as much from Jean Renoir’s “La grande illusion/La Grande illusion” (1937) as from Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17” (1953) a breathtaking all-male adventure paying tribute to the construction of suspense (emphasized by the editing without yielding by Ferris Webster, who received an Oscar nomination: the only one bestowed, somewhat ungenerously, on the film) the noblest tripartition of the classic cinematographic story: from the richly detailed preparation linked to thriller at every possible impasse or mistake at the central, nocturnal and pounding climax of the action, up to the third act, more openly spectacular in a Hollywood measure, in which destiny is fulfilled between ironic touches (already widely disseminated in the first part) and explosions of rhythm of the individual characters who have in the meantime become even more central and emblematic.

Among them (although it should not be forgotten the contribution of the entire and extraordinary cast, very well served by a screenplay capable of defining the psychologies of the protagonists with a superior class writing) obviously the never quite late Steve McQueen stands out – here in the third film with Sturges and in the eleventh of an arduous career that would see him protagonist of another nineteen before his untimely death in 1980-, in an essay of star-like and iconic “self-consciousness” to be studied, above all in the sequences that see him engaged on a motorcycle (one of his great passions) and more precisely riding a majestic Triumph TR6 Trophy (suitably disguised as a Teutonic BMW…). It was an extraordinary success with the public, albeit lukewarmly received by the critics; and for once there is no need to tear one’s clothes in the name of who knows what injustice. Even if, reviewed today, it remains an excellent example of a cinema that would no longer make any sense, but still able, in its strangely frequent television appearances, to capture the attention of the public in the same way as the great classics.