GREAT ESCAPE, THE 143
commotion, Bartlett and MacDonald manage to escape, but are captured getting
on a bus, when MacDonald mistakenly replies to a Gestapo agent in En glish. Mac-
Donald is quickly arrested but Bartlett manages to escape, though he is soon rec-
ognized and arrested by SS Lieutenant Steinach (Karl- Otto Alberty). Hilts steals a
motorcycle and is subsequently chased by a large contingent of German soldiers.
He passes over the German- Swiss border and gets into the Neutral Zone, but then
gets tangled in barbed wire and is arrested. Three trucks containing POWs go down
a road and then split in dif fer ent directions. The first vehicle, carry ing, MacDon-
ald, Cavendish, Haynes, and others, stops in a field, and the drivers ask the cap-
tives to exit the truck to “stretch their legs.” They are killed. In total, 50 prisoners
are killed and only Hendley and 9 fellow captives are brought back to the camp.
Von Luger has been discharged. Only three POWs make it out of Nazi Germany.
Danny and Willie row a boat to the Baltic coast and then stow away on a Swedish
vessel. Sedgwick pilfers a bicycle and hides on a freight train that takes him to
France, where he is brought to Spain by the French Re sis tance. Hilts is brought
back to the camp alone in handcuffs and ends up in the cooler. USAAF Lt. Goff
( Jud Taylor) grabs Hilts’ baseball and glove, tossing them his way when Hilt walks
by with the German guards. The guard locks Hilts in, and we hear the prisoner
throwing his ball against the cell wall.
Reception
The Great Escape had its world premiere at the Odeon in Leicester Square, London,
on 20 June 1963 and went into wide release in North Amer i ca on the Fourth of July
weekend. The movie did respectably well at the box office, grossing $11.7 million;
almost triple its $4 million production bud get, making it the 17th highest- grossing
American film of 1963. The movie also earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best
Picture and a Writers Guild of Amer i ca Award nomination for Best Written Ameri-
can Drama (Screenplay Adaptation). Less demanding critics, like Judith Crist, found
The Great Escape exhilarating: “A first- rate adventure film, fascinating in its detail,
suspenseful in its plot, stirring in its climax and excellent in per for mance... Steve
McQueen takes the honors” (Crist, 1963). As was often the case, Bosley Crowther
voiced his dissent, panning the film as puerile, unrealistic, and manipulative:
“Nobody is going to con me... into believing that the spirit of defiance in any
prisoner- of- war camp anywhere was as arrogant, romantic and Rover Boyish as it is
made to appear in this film. And nobody’s going to induce me with shameless Hol-
lywood cliffhanging tricks... to surrender my reason and my emotions to the sort
of fiction fabricated here... It’s strictly a mechanical adventure with make- believe
men” (Crowther, 1963). Four years after its theatrical release CBS aired The Great
Escape on TV (in two parts) in September 1967, exposing the film to a much wider
viewing audience and cementing its stature as a classic of the POW war film genre.
Reel History Versus Real History
The Great Escape is a reasonably accurate rendition of POW life at Stalag Luft III,
though living conditions were more wretched than the film suggests. The look of the
camp and its environs, the tunnels, the escape organ ization and all its specialized