Review: John Sturges’s The Great Escape on Kino Lorber 4K Ultra HD

Though adapted by James Clavell, W.R. Burnett, and an uncredited Walter Newman from Paul Brickhill’s nonfiction account of the 1944 Stalag Luft III escape, John Sturges’s The Great Escape is equally inspired by a great fiction. The filmmaker’s treatment of the massive POW escape from a camp in Nazi-occupied Poland alludes to a similar and iconic sequence from Grand Illusion Illusion, Jean Renoir’s no less furious and eloquent articulation of the faux civility of warfare. But if Sturges’s earlier The Magnificent Seven bound itself just a bit too tightly to the structure of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, The Great Escape builds its own distinct style and thematic preoccupations, even as its influences remain clear.

The absence of brutal ground warfare in The Great Escape reflects Struges’s personal experience during World War II: The director served as a captain in the Army Air Corps and spent a large portion of his time shooting documentaries and instructional films for the military. In The Great Escape, the filmmaker largely evades the action and horror of war, instead focusing on an immense creative process: the building of the tunnels that will help a group of prisoners, led by Royal Air Force squadron leader Roger “Big X” Bartlett (Richard Attenborough), get out from under the Luftwaffe. Each member of the dedicated team of soldiers, who come from various Allied Forces, provides a skill that helps the effort to build the tunnels, conceal the activity, and ultimately execute the thrilling escape.

This tactic allows for members of the uniformly excellent cast to highlight their personalities through their respective characters’ varied areas of expertise, from James Garner’s fast-talking and resourceful Scrounger to Steve McQueen’s incorrigible Cooler King to Donald Pleasance’s mild-mannered Forger. McQueen is front and center, but Sturges democratically shows the breadth of work being done and the essentialness of each man’s mission. This dense interweaving of talents working on what amounts to a great, heroic production implies Sturges’s view of filmmaking as inherently collaborative. Tellingly, Pleasance’s forgery expert has a need for a specific camera with a special lens, while another captive creates an expansive wardrobe to keep the soldiers inconspicuous outside of the camp.

The collateral damage of Sturges’s dedicated focus on the minutiae of the titular escape is that the grimness of the prisoners’ station is only mildly realized. A prisoner’s early escape attempt ends in a spray of bullets across his back, and when the prison break finally occurs, few of the escapees taste freedom for very long, but Sturges’s depiction of this civil incarceration operates far apart from the desperate, violent reality of the times. Even the prisoners’ infighting, and their interactions with their Nazi keepers, is relatively soft, little more than a few fists pounding on tables and some mockingly sarcastic retorts.

The film doesn’t offer easy catharsis, nor does it portray the Luftwaffe as essentially evil; the most prominent guard is, in fact, a complete dullard taken in by Garner’s smooth operator. Indeed, the filmmakers buck the vision of a solitary war hero who excites his fellow prisoners into revolt, and instead foreground the sense of duty in rebellion that drives the captured soldiers. And as the prisoners symbolize a broad swath of the international effort against the Axis powers, The Great Escape is that rare war film that doesn’t fully indulge in assumed nationalism, save for the fact that everyone speaks English. Sturges never touches on the essential hollowness and cruel pageantry of war, but he does the next best thing by depicting an international effort where victory, no matter how short-lived, depends on the cooperation of myriad talents, rather than the gruff can-do attitude of an unbreakable chosen one.

Image/Sound

Criterion’s restored 4K digital transfer of The Great Escape from last year boasts a generally sharp picture and impressive depth of field but also a green tint that did no favors to the film’s prison scenes and, especially, the faces of its actors. Kino’s 4K transfer is, then, a necessary course correction, as the image is less bright overall and possibly even more detailed. The prison scenes look appropriately drab, and the color of the pine tree forest in the background looks, well, like that of actual pine. There are a handful of scenes where the image noticeably softens, especially during the “Yankee Doodle Dandy” sequence around the 80-minute mark, but these instances are infrequent enough to never become too distracting. This is an SDR-only release, but to these eyes The Great Escape has never looked as good on home video as it does here. The uncompressed monaural soundtrack is clear, crisp, and roomy, and it especially benefits Elmer Bernstein’s memorably rousing score whenever it rises to the forefront.

Extras

The film is accompanied on disc one with two commentary tracks. The first, which appears on both the 2013 Fox Blu-ray and Criterion’s edition, is hosted by Steven Jay Rubin, author of Combat Films: American Realism, and includes comments from actors James Coburn, James Garner, Donald Pleasance, among others, as well as excerpts from a 1974 interview with John Sturges. The second and more essential one is newly recorded, and it gives center stage to Rubin and filmmaker and historian Steve Mitchell, both of whom offer a context-rich and often personal deep dive into the history and making of The Great Escape.

Disc two contains over two hours of featurettes. The 25-minute “The Real Virgil Hilts: A Man Called Jones,” which is narrated by Coburn and focuses on David Jones, the U.S. Army Air Corps pilot who served as the model for Steve McQueen’s character, has been carried over from the Criterion release. More substantial is Steven Clarke’s little-seen documentary The Great Escape: The Untold Story about the 1944 mass escape from the German prisoner of war camp Stalag Luft III that was dramatized by The Great Escape. Rounding things out are interviews, a trailer, and four TV documentary shorts from 2001 narrated by Burt Reynolds that focus on everything from the film’s themes to how Hollywood sought to sell it to the public by beefing up the role played by U.S. personnel in what was a largely British and Commonwealth affair.

Overall

Kino’s 4K UHD release of The Great Escape boasts a stellar image and an abundance of extras old and new that fans will delight in digging into from the inside.