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THE GREAT ESCAPE
STEVE MCQUEEN JAMES GARNER RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH IN
‘THE GREAT ESCAPE’
CO-STARRING JAMES DONALD CHARLES BRONSON
DONALD PLEASANCE JAMES COBURN
PRODUCED AND/DIRECTED BY JOHN STURGES SCREENPLAY
BY JAMES CLAVELL & W.R. BURNETT BASED UPON/THE BOOK
BY PAUL BRICKHILL
MUSIC/ELMER BERNSTEIN COLOR/BY DELUXE PANAVISION
A MIRISCH-ALPHA PICTURE
APPROX. FEATURE RUN TIME 2 HOURS 52 MINUTES COLOR 1963
DISCLAIMER
Although the characters are composites of real men, and time and place have been compressed, every detail of the escape is the way it really happened.3
ESCAPE STORY?
The American director John Sturges cut his directorial teeth making combat films with the US Army. His fascination with the escape story began in 1950, after reading a serialization of Paul Brickhill’s memoir in Reader’s Digest. Sturges tried to hook MGM, but studio boss Louis B Mayer was unimpressed. ‘What the hell kind of great escape is this?’ he asked. ‘No one escapes!’ The picture would be too depressing (fifty men are recaptured and murdered) and, besides, it would not appeal to women (there were no female characters). Mayer had a point. And Sturges wouldn’t make his film until twelve years later. Meanwhile there was Gunfight At The O.K. Corral (1957), The Old Man and The Sea (1958), and Never So Few (1959). Sturges left MGM and signed with Mirisch Company in 1959. His first film with Mirisch was The Magnificent Seven (1960). It starred Steve McQueen, James Coburn, and Charles Bronson. That same year, Sturges was fronted money to buy the rights to The Great Escape. He immediately contacted Paul Brickhill in Australia, who signed on as a partner in the deal.
SCREENPLAY
Up to five screenwriters worked on the film adaptation of Brickhill’s memoir. In the original screen treatment, William Roberts was given the task of establishing the technical flow of the film. Forget characterization, make the complicated linear. Walter Newman was hired to flesh out the original treatment by Roberts, but Newman, irritatingly, followed Paul Brickhill’s memoir too closely into sidetracking subplots and was dismissed before a polished script was in hand. Next up, a constructionist: W.R. Burnett. Burnett ripped the thing apart and found a new narrative line which focused on the ins and outs of the tunnel operation. This pleased Sturges immensely. James Clavell worked on location and during production and is spotlighted alongside Burnett in the opening credits. When things got slow, Ivan Moffat was hired to enhance the action sequences.
PRISONERS OF THE TRUTH
The first truth in acting is circumstance. This is an old Stanislavski trick. But the cast of The Great Escape were not method actors in the usual sense. The character roles in the movie were composites, created from historical persons, actual POWS, and in addition many of the actors, from both the Allied and Axis contingent, had their own wartime prison camp experiences to draw upon.
Donald Pleasance, who plays Flt Lt Colin Blythe or ‘The Forger,’ based on the map-maker Desmond Plunkett and forger Tim Walenn, served as a radio operator aboard an RAF Lancaster bomber. Pleasance was a POW of Stalag Luft I in Pomerania. Richard Attenborough, who portrays Squn Ldr Roger Bartlett, the Roger Bushell character ‘Big X,’ also served in the RAF. James Garner of the American contingent served in the Korean War and worked as an actual scrounger like Hendley, his resourceful character in the movie. Steve McQueen was a former marine. McQueen’s character, ‘The Cooler King’, was partly inspired by Eric Foster, a seven-time British escapee from German camps. James Coburn, who plays Sedgwick ‘Manufacturer’ (with a crap Australian accent), served in the US Armed Forces as a public information officer. Sedgwick is a creation of screenwriter James Clavell and an amalgam of compass-maker Al Hake and Johnny Travis, the actual camp Manufacturer. Charles Bronson was a B-29 tail-gunner in the Pacific. His character, Flt Lt Danny Velinski, is a smorgasbord based on Wally Floody, F/Lt Ernst Valenta, F/O Danny Kroll, and F/O Wlodzimiez. Wally Floody was the Canadian mining engineer and an original member of Luft III’s escape committee, who later served as a technical advisor on the film set.
Among the Goons, Richard Graff, who plays Werner ‘The Ferret’, was an army sergeant at the Russian Front. Hannes Messemer, ‘The Kommandant’, was a former POW in a Russian camp. Hans Reiser, who plays Kuhn, was a prisoner of the Americans. So was Til Kiwe, Frick the Ferret; Kiwe spent a good part of the war in Arizona. And Harry Riebauer, Sergeant Strachwitz, served six years in the German Army at the Russian front, seeing action in Stalingrad.
EVEN BERNSTEIN AND JAMES CLAVELL
Even Elmer Bernstein, responsible for the film score, composer of pastoral strains, orchestrator of pluck and circumstance, whose cocky melody of rattling snares and competing fifes and piccolos speaks to perky defiance—this Bernstein (not Leonard: unrelated) was enlisted in the US Army and served in the radio unit in NYC during WWII. And the screenwriter and novelist James Clavell—of Shogun and King Rat fame—had joined the British Royal Artillery at age seventeen. Clavell spent three-and-a-half years in Changi Prison, in Singapore, a POW of the Japanese.
IMPROVISATION
Many scenes in the movie were improvised. Good. Herein lies strength. Genius is struck left-handed. There was no ‘final’ screenplay. No such thing. By the last week of filming at least eleven versions of the script were in circulation. Nonetheless the actors believed firmly that with fictionalizing real life came a great responsibility. Who might have felt this more than Charles Bronson, himself the son of a coal miner, whose character Tunnel King was a composite of no less than four former POWs of Stalag Luft III?
PROMOTION DEPARTMENT & BLOND BIMBOS
From day one, United Artists was hot on the tail of John Sturges, hounding the director to slip some women into the story. One idea put to Sturges by the promotion department was having the American Scrounger—James Garner’s character—blackmail his way out of Goering’s homoerotic compound early on, and then shack up with a German Mädchen beyond the wire. This Mädchen could be quite something! Like, an American bombshell! Or an Aryan Ode to Joy! Sturges didn’t bite. Even after shooting began, the letters from United Artists kept coming: could Dispersal, the David McCallum character—after he is shot near the end—be cradled in the lap of a leggy bystander? McCallum could speak his last words across the bow of leggy bystander’s low-cut blouse. United Artists went as far to suggest Sturges and crew find their gal by organizing a Miss Prison Camp Beauty Contest in nearby Munich. Claptrap. Sturges would have no part of the publicity department nonsense. Go figure, a nuts and bolts director, not a tits and ass man after all.
DRAMA MCQUEEN
Sturges began shooting in early June, and by July he had a bigger problem on his hands than quenching the promotion department’s thirst for a femme fatale. Steve McQueen. McQueen had decided his part was too small. His character Hilts was confusing. In the original screenplay, Hilts appears in the barracks but then disappears from the film for a good thirty minutes. To McQueen, a star on the rise, who’d done The Magnificent Seven with Sturges alongside fellow Great Escapists James Coburn and Charles Bronson, a little character development was a modest request. After walking off the set in protest, rumours spread that McQueen had been fired. This wasn’t true. Nonetheless, Mirisch and United Artists grew alarmed. The corporate heavyweights fretted about losing McQueen’s star power. Even if no Americans participated in the actual breakout, Hollywood stars like McQueen, Garner and Bronson were deemed invaluable and necessary for drawing audiences into movie theatres and putting bums in seats. Additional sums were forthcoming if money was needed to hire a new writer … McQueen returned to the set after six weeks, only after Sturges hired the writer Ivan Moffat. Moffat created the scene inside the camp where McQueen breaks out though a blind spot in the perimeter fence, and he also amped up McQueen’s cooler gig, for which the All-Ameri
can is given a baseball mitt and ball to throw against the cement wall.
HISTORICIZED
The name Michael Paryla does not appear in the film’s final credits. Initially cast as an extra, my distant cousin was eclipsed by the star power on set. Indeed, it is impossible to identify my relative unless you have access to family photographs. Even so, speaking from experience, Paryla was hard to find. Imagine that moment when I pinned him down, my mixed emotions and über surprise. There he was for all the world to see: dressed in plain clothes, ravishing, and up to no good. Of a slight build and boyish yet. Flaxen hair. Positively plagued by his blond hair. Cousin Michael was convincing.
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FACTORS OF SUCCESS
Stalag Luft’s escape committee articulated four factors of success: 1) No moon; 2) A moderate wind to cover up noises; 3) Reasonable weather; 4) No Ferret snooping outside Hut 104.
THE ESCAPE PARTY
The escape committee estimated that, out of the 600 or more that had been involved in the operation, approximately 220 men might be able to get through the tunnel. To start off, 70 prisoners were selected. Each of them had already learned a fake identity. German speakers were given priority and rewarded with train tickets. The rest of the lot would hard-ass across the country on foot.
OPENING NIGHT
24 March 1944. The theatre is in dress rehearsal for Pygmalion. The faint rumble of bombs dropping on Berlin sixty miles away can be heard in camp. Sirens and air raid alarms. The power switches off. The boundary lights and searchlights go out. So far so good, but then it begins to snow. For the hard arsers the going would be slow. They would be easy to track down.
1st MAN OUT
Johnny Bull struggled to loosen the boards of the exit trap. He used his little shovel to scrape through. Alas, the tunnel surveyors had blundered. Harry was short. The exit hole was twenty feet shy of the treeline. But there was no turning back—the meticulously forged papers were stamped. Time to improvise.
2ND MAN OUT
Roger Bushell decides to make a go of it and drops the part of Professor Higgins on his understudy. Bushell is the second man out at approximately 9:45 pm. He is wearing a black overcoat (an RAF coat dyed with boot polish) and a dark felt hat and carrying the papers of a French businessman inside his attaché case. He heads directly for Sagan railway station.
FUDGE
Let’s hear it for the hard arsers. The hard arsers, wearing petit berets and carrying blanket rolls and cans of fudge, heading into enemy territory on foot. Hitler is about to call for the largest manhunt of the war and without a doubt the hard arsers don’t stand a chance. They might as well get seated in the snow right now and lean back against the base of a pine tree and gobble down their concentrated escape food (made from goods contained in Red Cross parcels—a hefty compound of sugar, cocoa, Bemax, condensed milk, raisins, oats, margarine, chocolate and ground biscuits), if they can stomach it, in one go.
ALARM
Out of the two hundred and seventy airmen with tickets for the escape, seventy-six make it beyond the treeline and disappear into the soulless Silesian night before the camp escape alarm sounds. The next three coming are captured by sentries at Harry’s mouth. The remaining prisoners en route hurry back, past Piccadilly Station and Leicester Square—no time to chat—and reappear, hands-raised, under the stove in Hut 104.
Movie Time
2:06:37
Exterior Shot. Morning. Neustadt Rail Station. A handful of escapees in civilian clothes reach the station. These include Big X, the Roger Bushell character played by Richard Attenborough, and his partner Intelligence, played by Gordon Jackson. Big X and Intelligence ignore Dispersal, who is loitering by a lamp post further along the concrete platform. Dispersal is a loner. When the camera turns on him, he buries his face in the newspaper, Die Völkischer Beobachter. But it’s obvious to a movie audience who Dispersal is: David McCallum.
The train is late. Big X and Intelligence betray anxious expressions. Momentarily, Hendley the Scrounger and Blythe the Forger, played by James Garner and Donald Pleasance, respectively, approach from the opposite side of the tracks. Hendley leads Blythe like an old woman by the arm. By this stage, Blythe has gone blind from his painstaking work—five hours a day for a year—in the forgery factory. He can see no evil. Hendley the Scrounger looks around, aghast. Two-thirds of the people waiting for the train to Breslau are escapees. Already many have missed their connection.
On the eve of 24 March 1944, Berlin was hit hard by an air raid. This fact explains the train’s delay. However the air raid is not in the movie. The actors waiting on the platform have been instructed to behave accordingly: like escapees who wouldn’t have known there was an air raid over Berlin the previous evening. Thus here the actors are the real prisoners of the truth.
2:07:54
Exterior Shot. The motorcade swings into Neustadt Station. Nazis à la mode, Michael included, arrive in time to catch the train.
Neustadt’s historical antecedent, Sagan, was part of the
Breslau Gestapo and Kriminalpolizei area. Accordingly, the motorcade personnel would have been hand-picked by Oberregierungsrat Max Wielen, area chief of the Kriminalpolizei. Which makes the actor Michael Paryla, what? Gestapo or Kriminalpolizei? One or the other.4
Big X and Intelligence are first to board the train when it arrives. They fear nothing so much as John Sturges’ directorial wrath. Ensuite, the remaining POWs—Scrounger, Forger, Dispersal, to name several—climb aboard, according to plan, setting the foundation for a series of clever set pieces later on.
We get our first full body shot of the aching chimera Michael Paryla when he strolls past the station house in his unbuttoned tan trench coat and brown fedora at 2:08:14. Four seconds of flesh here, flanked by two extras. The accompanying figures are members of the local Landswehr; they are not Gestapo or SS or even Subliminalpolizei. Brown haired, not blond, they blow. Woollen jackets cinched at the waist. Fabulous billowing pants tucked into knee-high polished leather. They are clowns. Jodhpurs-clad, local yokels. There’s no disguising their lumpen follow-the-Fuhrerness.
Michael Paryla confidently climbs aboard at 2:08:37. He turns on his right and we see his back after another nine seconds.
Next frame: Train no. 78185 cranks its way forward, breaking off from the station platform like a long ship out of harbour.
2:08:58
Interior Shot. Train. We see commuters on a busy run taking their daily travels along the Berlin-Breslau line. Big X and Intelligence enter the crowded coach. Facing camera is a fresh-faced Nazi youth. Seated beside him is an elderly woman: stern, stout, and tight-lipped she is, evidently humourless and yet pleased to bits with her provincial self. So, these are ordinary citizens, commuting for the Third Reich. Alles in Ordnung. All is in order, and in its place, youth and old age. Sharing the inverse side of the bench is a pair of off-duty SS officers.
Big X steps forward. He stops before the sluggish SS officers. The officer in the aisle seat is dozing and has his feet up on the seat.
Big X clears his throat. The sleeping SS man comes to and drops his feet to the floor. Big X and Intelligence take their seats.
2:09:35
Exterior Shot. Nameless Village Square. This sequence was filmed in Füssen, an hour’s drive south of Munich, a town with a distinct Alpine quality. James Coburn enters the square on foot, carrying a brown leather suitcase. He must be one of the hard arsers. He looks about like a boy scout, then approaches a stand of bicycles to his right. He selects one and inserts his suitcase under the jaws of the back-wheel trap. Nonchalantly, he pulls a pair of metal cutters from his breast pocket. The cutters are rudimentary. They resemble a harsh pair of toenail clippers. Nonetheless Coburn snips chain and lock and then leads the bicycle by its front handlebar out of captivity. He plays it very cool: Coburn is chic, a casual bicycle thief, dressed in Henri-Cartier Bresson era brown tweed a
nd cap.5 Indeed, Coburn is The Manufacturer.6 Sturges, the director, gave Coburn freedom, and Coburn designed the character (his own) himself. What does this reveal?7
At last, The Manufacturer takes the stolen bicycle out for a slow, meandering ride, accompanied by the pastoral strains of Elmer Bernstein’s soundtrack.
2:10:25
Exterior Shot. Paved Road. Day. Meadowlands and pastures. This scene was filmed on a stretch of open highway outside Füssen.
The hyperactive Hilts character played by Steve McQueen climbs out of the ditch and ties a wire to the barrier post. He scoots across the road and strings the wire, fastening it to the far post.
Here the soundtrack grows noticeably more menacing. Hilts hides in the ditch. The idea to stretch piano wire across the road to decapitate the enemy came from the French Underground, who used the technique during the war. The Underground had observed that motorcycle guards travelled front and rear of high brass cars. They would stretch piano wire at a 45 degree angle and lie it slack across the road. Once the car had passed, they raised it taut and knocked off the back rider. This seems to be what Hilts is up to here.8
This Great Escape Page 10
