movie: the great escape

The other day I was in the flat and casually went to iTunes to see what cheap movies that had for rentals. Most of the time their top 100 rentals make me laugh (number one rental right now is Fool's Gold.... really? really?), but I can usually find something that looks worthy of watching.


This time The Great Escape caught my eye, so I downloaded the rental (for 99 cents) and waited for SJ to get home so I could tell him about the great looking film that I found. Unfortunately, though he was excited to see it, it turns out that in England they play this film around Christmas every year. Only in England would a film about WWII prisoner-of-war escape artists become a tradition at Christmas. In the States our traditional films are 24 hours of A Christmas Story, A Charlie Brown Christmas, A Christmas Carol, and It's a Wonderful Life..... none of which SJ has ever seen! (besides Charlie Brown, which I made him watch) The anarchy!

I digress.

The Great Escape. It's a great film about a maximum security prisoner-of-war camp that the Germans opened in 1943 to hold all of the craftiest English and American army escape artists. Why the Germans would think that the best way to keep them all from escaping is to put them all in the same place is beyond me, but it's a true story, so I guess it shows just one of the reasons why they lost the war. The film is 2 hours 51 minutes and 57 seconds, so I was a bit daunted at first, as 3 hour films usually lose my interest quickly, but I didn't lose focus once while watching.

The first half of the film is about their attempts to escape the camp, while the second follows their journeys as they try to get out of Germany. An all-star cast for the 1960s headlines the film as well, with Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson and James Coburn.