World War II. Stalag Luft III is a special POW camp in Upper Silesia run by the German forces, established to keep all the highly skilled escape artists at one place for maximum security, mostly British and American officers. Among them is Captain Hilts, who provokes the guards and lands in a solitary confinement on his first day. In the meantime, British officers Roger and Ramsey start a plan of digging three tunnels under their barracks, hoping to free all 250 inmates and send them into the nearby forest. When the German officers discover one of their tunnels, the inmates rush to complete the second tunnel. Even though the tunnel is 20 yards too short of the forest, 76 still manage to escape during the night, before the prison guards start a search party. Hendley leads the almost blind Blythe on a plane to try to fly to the Swiss territory, but they carsh. The German soldiers capture and shoot 50 of the escaped convicts. Hilts is returned back to the camp alive.
One of the most popular war movies of the 60s, excellent "The Great Escape" by the sometimes surprisingly versatile director John Sturges ("Bad Day at Black Rock", "The Magnificent Seven") is an unusually optimistic and upbeat story despite its nominally depressive topic of inmates trapped in a POW camp, a one which holds up even today. Kudos goes to the director's eye for details, since almost every little scene plays a role later on in the story, as well as a wide range of interesting characters, many of which have a great sense of humor: in one sequence, the inmates quickly hide the tunnel on the ground, while the digger Welinski (Charles Bronson) conveniently rushes to the shower, to clean away any signs of dirt on him—when the prison guard asks what they are doing, Welinski just goes: "Shower. I need a wash!", whereas Sedgwick, who is observing Welinski, says: "I'm watching him. I'm a lifeguard." Numerous ideas and solutions are innventive, such as when the inmates carry a rope from one side of the tunnel until its end, to measure how long it is, or when they have a problem of how to get rid of all the ground from the tunnel, since they put it on the table to compare it with the yellow ground of their compound, realizing that the tunnel dirt is much darker and is thus visible if they just throw it outside. All this is directed with a lot of passion, displaying the ingenuity of the inmates in order to find ways to escape. While the film's music theme is kind of naive and too cheerful, it is still highly memorable, nontheless. Among the flaws are the lack of an emotional engagement of the characters, whereas the film loses a lot of its energy in the last third when some inmates escape and roam the trains and cities, which is simply not that suspenseful nor inspired. Despite a tragic ending, it is almost as if Sturges sends a message that trying to achieve one's freedom or a dream of a better life is never a waste of time, regardless of the outcome, creating a movie monument to these people.
Grade:+++
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