The Great Escape

Saturday, January 26, 2008

This is the kind of klassik I'm talking about, great entertainment. I'm pretty sure I had seen about 70% of The Great Escape before, and thought now would be a great time to actually see the entire thing. So the Saturday night gang all watched it with me, and I think whether we had seen it before or not, we all loved it.

John Sturges, the director, keeps the movie tight and exciting, an impressive feat considering the film's length. And the screenplay does a great job of presenting a lot of information and making it interesting and funny, and then manages to smoothly transition to a little darker/more somber feel in the finale, then go back to feel-good for the very end. Again, impressive.

But if I had to really point at what makes the movie work, it's the cast. First off, we have Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Garner, James Coburn... it's like they figured if the movie ended up sucking, it would still function as a Convention of Cool Actors and Badasses. And the rest of the cast is top notch, too. There's so much going on here with the that it's great how dominant the character work feels. I mean, it's not like the most searing, empathetic, insightful stuff going on, but they establish a lot of strong personalities and flesh them out. This is to the screenwriters' credit, but even moreso to the actors, who I think use their screen personas to help make the characters seem more fully realized.

I suppose most of this is lighter entertainment without much of a point (other than, you know, America: fuck yeah!), but it's great entertainment and great filmmaking.

Later this week, I will be watching Sturges' The Magnificent Seven, an earlier film of his with some of the same cast, that is also a remake of Seven Samurai. So it will actually be a follow up to 2 of my posts. Hopefully, unless I'm feeling lazy, I can do a little Auteur Theory type analysis, as well as some remake-comparison.