![]() ![]() Of course, The Great Escape is not so much a battles-in-war movie as a prisoner-of-war movie, and here too, I think the film is very much of its times. Three years into that fraught decade that was the 1960s, The Great Escape already evinces some of that despair about – and even downright questioning of – the adventure of war that would run through the period. It’s not easily and cheerfully an adventure film. And second – and this is dominant in my own approach to the film – I don’t think that The Great Escape really is as rousingly gung ho as all that. First, rousing male adventures are still being made and many don’t revise the ideology of the older model. Yet there are two problems with this kind of thinking. ![]() With its ensemble cast efforts-combined with stand-out stars like Steve McQueen-high production values, and adept crafting of nail-biting suspense, The Great Escape might well seem like a film appealing to those nostalgic for an older Hollywood, one referred to wistfully as “the kind of picture they just don’t make any more.” As a last gasp of the old Hollywood, The Great Escape references a tradition of consummate escapism but it is very downbeat and un-escapist, both metaphorically and literally, in its overall take on history and masculine endeavor. The Great Escape looks back to a golden Hollywood of action entertainment, but it also is arguably very much a Sixties film - with all the doubts, tensions, contradictions that characterize that period. In my research for Dreams of Flight, I reached out to other viewers who first saw The Great Escape in the 1960s and found many had comparable reactions. ![]() I know from other fan accounts that I was not alone in feeling something disturbing and consequential was going on instead -in the film and in the times themselves. At the time, I was a pre-teen American boy who especially liked “manly” action cinema and expected from the trailers and posters that The Great Escape fit that mold. I have always imagined that my experience of movies is not mine alone but is likely representative of demographic currents I have been inscribed within and may be shared by others in the same demographic. As I write in Dreams of Flight, this unexpected narrative turn was a theme I began to notice in other films of that historical moment - one that is telling of American culture in the 1960s. The Great Escape’s downbeat turn from a fun romp into fatalism left a lasting impression on me, one that motivated my new book, Dreams of Flight: The Great Escape in American Film and Culture. ![]()
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