The great escape6/12/2023 It’s a long, slow process, but with specialists in scrounging, tunneling, gathering intelligence, forging, distracting, and more, Bartlett and his team begin an undertaking of such magnitude, teamwork, and skill that it makes for an absolutely thrilling cinematic experience. A considerable amount of tools, supplies, outfits, identification papers, rations, maps, and manpower are required – as well as time. Immediately organizing a meeting amongst the officers, he lays out the basic plot of digging three tunnels (to be dubbed Tom, Dick, and Harry) simultaneously to free approximately 250 men. Roger Bartlett (Richard Attenborough), a particularly skilled planner, is brought to the camp, where he surveys that essentially every great escape artist in Germany has been gathered. And several participants are introduced to the “cooler,” a set of separated cells used for extreme isolation (but still much more forgiving than the hot box in “The Bridge on the River Kwai”). On the first day (in the first twenty minutes), numerous escape attempts are mounted but none are successful. But, it is an officer’s duty to try to escape, to cause an inordinate amount of enemy soldiers to guard them, and to harass those sentries whenever possible. It’s Luger’s hope that Ramsey will be a cooperative liaison to help keep fellow detainees from causing problems so that they can all sit out the war as comfortably as possible. It houses a remarkable accumulation of allied soldiers from the ongoing WWII, most of which are repeat escapers. Playful, cheeky, overly lenient at times (cursorily attributed to the governance by the Luftwaffe as opposed to the SS or Gestapo), but still mindful of mortality and severity in the end, “The Great Escape” is an epic account of a monumental wartime endeavor.Ĭaptain Posen (Robert Freitag) escorts Senior British officer and new captive Captain Ramsey (James Donald) to the Kommandant, Colonel Von Luger (Hannes Messemer), of the enormous, recently constructed, high-security prisoner-of-war camp. For the subject matter and affectation, it can be compared to the whistled tune from “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” It perfectly sets the mood and tone for a film that undeniably shows a lighter, wittier, more adventurous, and action-packed angle of the Second World War. He courageous, booming march by Elmer Bernstein that opens the picture is instantly one of the most memorable and notable pieces of music in cinema history (though it isn’t regularly repeated throughout, instead used sparingly and in conjunction with more orchestral arrangements).
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