“It can be illuminating to unpack the process by which what ‘really happened’ in 1944 became a fictional film in 1963.”

By Dana Polan

I first saw The Great Escape at my local drive-in in the mid-1960s. I was around 12 or 13, and the film blew me away. Its turn from gung-ho romp to downbeat fatalism was something I hadn’t anticipated, and the film remained with me as something to come to grips with. My newly published book, Dreams of Flight: The Great Escape in American Film and Culture, just out from the University of California Press, stands as the culmination of my engagement with the film and its history over the years.

The film came out in 1963 so my viewing must have been of a re-release following its first run. Yet I’d long been aware of the film, or at least of what I imagined the film to be as promoted in its iconic poster — men fleeing from background to foreground under words that promised “The great adventure! The great entertainment! The Great Escape” — and all that buoyant spirit readily appealed to me as a typical American boy of the times for whom war was (still) imagined as great and grand enterprise.

For the book, I interviewed by email several military aficionados and film scholars about their first memories of the film. I found overwhelmingly that my experience was similar to theirs: We had expected a Hollywood film of moral clarity and rousing commitment and had been bewildered, even affected in a woundingly emotional way, by this film that veered into despair and deflation.

Strikingly, a number of my correspondents who saw the film in adolescence as I did found its impact heightened by an opening text just after the credits that asserted: “This is a true story. 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.” To the younger viewer, such text would carry authority and the weight of authenticity: How could one doubt the claim to veracity?

This was cinema as history, and history through cinema. In its release and re-release across the 1960s (including a two-part showing on network TV in 1968), The Great Escape is in fact inscribed in two histories — that of the original war-time events of 1944 and the incipient wartime of the Vietnam 60s, the latter standing as an inchoate presence that we kids were beginning to sense in the moment.

The year 1963 is, as far as I can tell, when American popular culture first mentions “Vietnam” explicitly— in an episode of The Twilight Zone where a dad who telepathically knows that his son is dying on the battlefield in that faraway place makes a deal with the supernatural to sacrifice his own life instead. The message being: War is not a glorious adventure you gladly offer your offspring to, but a horror that you need to protect them from. When the buoyant The Great Escape turns dour about halfway through, and characters we had fun with start getting killed off, the film taps into uneasy sentiments of the times that would turn ever increasingly negative as the decade developed.

It can be illuminating to unpack the process by which what “really happened” in 1944 became a fictional film in 1963, but it is also necessary to note how the paths of history blur, the filmic representation sometimes taking over in cultural memory our sense of pastness. While there were no motorcycles flying over barbed wire fences in the actual 1944 escape (and, in fact, no Americans engaged in the derring-do at all), it’s noteworthy that at least two re-editions of POW Paul Brickhill’s 1950 bestselling account of the escape sport on their cover the image of the film’s charismatic and cool Steve McQueen on his motorbike as if that iconic image sums up not only the later filmic rendition of the events but those events themselves. As many of the avocational military historians who painstakingly study the events in 1944 (there are at least a dozen volumes that claim to parse “what really happened”) would tell me, they often came to their historical research from first seeing the film — and, importantly, generally liking it — and wanting then to know more.

As I chronicle in my book, the revision of the historical events into narrative account began early on. Brickhill, an Australian who had worked as a journalist before the war, was a POW at Stalag Luft III, where the escape was launched from. He had planned to be among the men who took the tunnel out until it was discovered that he had extreme claustrophobia and might endanger the escape if he panicked. But Brickhill’s journalistic talents in rapid-fire notetaking had led him, along with another journalist, South African Conrad Norton, to be assigned to transcription and then narration throughout the camp of BBC broadcasts over radios hidden away in the prison barracks. Going from site to site within the camp, Brickhill and Norton started interviewing prisoners about their adventures in getting caught and, eventually, in trying to get away.

They published an initial collection of such stories as Escape to Danger, in 1946, the first part of which was by Norton and chronicled this or that prisoner’s capture. Norton was enamored by amazing stories of fliers who survived falls without parachutes, grabbing onto someone else wafting down with their own parachute or landing on a snow-covered mountain top and sliding down through the cushioning drifts. The second part of the book was essentially Brickhill’s account of Stalag Luft III breakout.

Each man kept ownership of the sections he was most responsible for, so Brickhill was free after the war to conduct more research on the “great escape,” including returning to Germany to follow up on the execution of 50 of the escapees and on Allied pursuit and prosecution of their Nazi murderers. He first made his account available through newspaper articles and interviews as well as magazine pieces (including a gripping version in Reader’s Digest) before achieving tremendous success with the book version in 1950.

From his time as a journalist, where catching the essence of events quickly through compelling prose that immediately brought the reader into the scene had been his special forte, Brickhill offered a narrative of a gripping sort (complemented by reasoned guesses as to what those within the events would likely be thinking).

The book of The Great Escape recounted the fateful night of March 1944, but it pointedly told it as a story rich in suspense, character and impactful structuring. For example, he cinematically crosscuts between scenes playing out simultaneously, but in different parts of the camp: from the tunnel to the barracks above.

At some point between the magazine versions and the book itself, film director John Sturges came across Brickhill’s tale and tried to buy the rights for himself. But the author worried about a Hollywood betrayal of his tale and, in any case, Sturges at the time was pretty much a B-movie director without the sort of clout to put together a compelling project.

Only after Sturges rose in the ranks through the 1950s, garnering a Best Director nomination for Bad Day at Black Rock and proving his talent at star-driven films of collective male action, like The Magnificent Seven, was he able to begin production on his cherished project of The Great Escape.

By the end of the 1950s, Brickhill was no longer the luminary he had been earlier in the decade when his other World War Two bestsellers, The Dam Busters and Reach for the Sky, helped him corner the U.K. market for military saga. By that point maybe he was ready to relent on the idea of a Hollywood rendition of his book on the “great escape.”

Brickhill in fact had allowed for a one-off television adaption of his book in 1951 with NBC. There is a 16-mm copy of the telefilm in the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Closely based on Brickhill’s book, it resolutely portrays the escape as a British (and, more broadly, European) venture with Americans participating, as they had in the original events, in planning stages. The Germans moved the “Yanks” fearing too much productive cooperation between them and their British POW counterparts. Nonetheless, as a concession perhaps to U.S. television audiences, some of the Commonwealth figures were portrayed by American actors, like E.G. Marshall or, most strikingly, Everett Sloan of Citizen Kane fame in a valiant rendition of the escape leader, Roger Bushell, complete with clipped British accent.

Brickhill himself lent his voice as narrator to a multi-episode Australian radio adaptation of The Great Escape in 1954. Replete with audio effects, this rendition sounds very much like so many other action serials on radio from the 1930s.

Beyond these direct adaptations of Brickhill’s book, the 1950s saw a strong tradition of POW escape books and movies, some of which directly seem to borrow from The Great Escape. There was even an Anglo-American production, The Password is Courage, released a year before Sturges’ film, that appears to have stolen a scene from Brickhill. The earlier film shows how on the night of one escape the tunnel is discovered to have come up short and the hero, the wonderfully named Charlie Coward, has to devise a signal so POWs know when it safe to come up one by one and run toward safety. The scene is so close to the escape scene in the book and film of The Great Escape that producer Walter Mirisch almost had second thoughts on letting Sturges go ahead with the costly epic.

He relented, of course, and the film went on to great box office success and has become a popular cult classic. Advertisements use its rousing Elmer Bernstein musical theme whose recognizability ensures connotations of dynamism, can-do derring-do, unflagging enterprise. Movies and television shows, from The Simpsons to Chicken Run, also trope off of the buoyant musical theme, as well as iconic visual motifs (man on motorcycle, above all). These later works of popular culture add to the cultural endurance of The Great Escape and further the process — as well as further complicate the process — by which this adaptation of real historical events continues to accrue resonant power as key itself to culture’s memory of history.

Dana Polan is the author of Dreams of Flight: The Great Escape in American Film and Culture. A professor of cinema studies at New York University, his previous books include The LEGO Movie and Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film.