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" I found the postcard in Paris, where I was embarrassed about buying it.  Nobody beats French salesclerks at conveying scorn while making change--or so their unnerved customers imagine, since in fact the kid manning this joint&amp;#039;s cash register couldn&amp;#039;t have given less of a rat&amp;#039;s ass what I was into. Feeling furtive and sordidly middle-aged just the same, I slunk out, tucking the evidence of my vice inside my raincoat. It&amp;#039;s been taped to my office door ever since--just above Sarah Michelle Gellar&amp;#039;s va-va-voom &amp;quot;Got Milk?&amp;quot; ad, whose edges have curdled slightly, and to the right of Jean Seberg in Breathless, bought at the same store in an act of cinephiliac atonement. In it, wearing a wary expression--along with a sweatshirt and chinos that you suspect weren&amp;#039;t standard gear for real-life Allied POWs in 1944, or even less for ragamuffin movie stars in 1963--the Cooler King is sitting on his stolen Nazi motorcycle, next to a sign that screams achtung and halt. So even slowpokes won&amp;#039;t wonder who&amp;#039;s being warned, an arrow underneath the halt points directly at him. Once, almost any thirteen-year-old boy you asked could have recited what happens next: the double fence at the Swiss border, those swarming Krauts, the bike jump. The McQueen-in-thorns moment when he&amp;#039;s tangled in the wire. Then they march Steve back inside the camp&amp;#039;s gates, where he starts making a baseball go ca-thunk against the wall as that rousingly plucky music plays--and what I&amp;#039;m trying to explain is that I really had no choice. When my pal Dolores and I finally got a DVD player last fall, we decided to inaugurate our new toy by each picking out one movie we just had to own. The media omnivorium at our local mall was crammed with indisputable Hollywood and foreign classics that I might at least have considered. Instead, I reached as one hypnotized for The Great Escape, John Sturges&amp;#039;s boisterous, all-star World War II adventure epic, which I already owned on video. But not in widescreen, among other inducements. The paradoxical effect of home video was that movies were downgraded from experiences and upgraded to fetish objects--think of kids who&amp;#039;ve seen Ferris Bueller&amp;#039;s Day Off more times than its director did, re-renting it to use as TV wallpaper at parties. Unlike all but the fanciest &amp;quot;special edition&amp;quot; videos, DVDs were designed to cater to our inner Trekkie from the start. The Great Escape isn&amp;#039;t even a notably elaborate example, lacking two of the format&amp;#039;s plum attractions: play-by-play directorial commentary, Sturges being no longer with us, and scenes cut from the theatrical release, as none were apparently preserved, if any existed. But it does feature a pretty good twenty-four-minute &amp;quot;making of&amp;quot; doc to supplement the cover art&amp;#039;s foldout booklet of production trivia, along with the original 1963 trailer. Though hugely popular then and since, The Great Escape has never been burdened with either classic status or the sort of public veneration that Entertainment Weekly roundups of our movie past love to certify, either of which would probably detract from my pleasure in it. But it&amp;#039;s clearly one of those movies that&amp;#039;s stayed a cherished point of reference for all sorts of people--Matt Groening, for one, whose own puckish homage was the celebrated Simpsons episode in which baby Maggie led a breakout from a daycare center. More recently, there&amp;#039;s been the full-scale spoof-cum-tribute Chicken Run--whose own DVD extras, by the way, are as charming as the movie itself. That both send-ups are frankly kiddie-oriented as well as uncommonly good-natured is a tip-off to the nature of the original&amp;#039;s appeal. One reason the grown-up in me feels even more sheepish than the critic about doting on The Great Escape is that it isn&amp;#039;t just a &amp;quot;guy movie,&amp;quot; a term I deplore. Uh-uh: It&amp;#039;s a boys&amp;#039; movie, valorizing playground behavior by transferring it to a crisis situation. Despite being based on an actual mass escape whose collective ingenuity the film takes pains to re-create--albeit one whose tragic outcome the filmmakers are careful to give short shrift by massacring the Brit character actors while the hearty Yank stars get off scot-free--what&amp;#039;s on the screen has about as much to do with World War II as the Hardy Boys do with the Manson family.  Elsewhere, though, Sturges didn&amp;#039;t even have to alter the facts that much to turn The Great Escape into what it so entertainingly is--namely, and damn near literally, the ultimate Tinkertoy sandbox movie. No other Hollywood epic has ever done so much to validate the average small boy&amp;#039;s mania for projects and gizmos and improvised thingamajigs, all the more enchantingly because the whole endeavor is carried on for desperate stakes and in secret. The basic situation has such dramatic clarity that we&amp;#039;re spared the big-picture lectures that drag down so many World War II blockbusters--the &amp;quot;Dammit, man, don&amp;#039;t you realize that Hitler has been master of Europe for four years now?&amp;quot; sort of thing. The few declamatory moments that do get included, chiefly Richard Attenborough&amp;#039;s rant about Nazi perfidy early on, seem gratuitous; it&amp;#039;s when Sturges sticks to the idiot&amp;#039;s delight of &amp;quot;Here&amp;#039;s how they dug the tunnel&amp;quot; that you can&amp;#039;t get enough of the movie. In the crowning boys&amp;#039;- adventure touch, the credits identify the characters by skill as well as by name. A number of critics have objected that the high-spirited treatment travesties the ordeal the movie is based on. And maybe so, but part of what makes The Great Escape a keepsake of a bygone movie era is its utter confidence in its own values--not just the stirring ones (teamwork, courage, enterprise against odds) the story celebrates, but the sturdy Hollywood vocabulary of star turns and robust action and hoked-up dramatic conflicts that are the movie&amp;#039;s means of celebrating them. Robert Aldrich&amp;#039;s 1965 Flight of the Phoenix--another sandbox movie, and pretty much the all-male version of Clare Boothe Luce&amp;#039;s The Women to boot--may have been the last of Hollywood&amp;#039;s big action blockbusters to have this sort of integrity, which is why I&amp;#039;m sorry Michael Mann apparently isn&amp;#039;t remaking it after all. Only a couple of years later, Aldrich&amp;#039;s own The Dirty Dozen ushered in the new era we&amp;#039;ve pretty much lived in since.  Like Sturges&amp;#039;s The Magnificent Seven, with which it shares half its cast, The Great Escape is also a showcase for stars in their youth--not just McQueen but James Garner, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn, all of whom represented a new generation of movie actors for whom the Theatuh didn&amp;#039;t exist. Visibly in the pink of health and nascent fame, sporting their natty uniforms under perennially blue skies--I&amp;#039;m damned if I can see why the filmmakers went to Germany only to wait for weather that approximated Malibu&amp;#039;s--they don&amp;#039;t remotely resemble the &amp;quot;ragged, verminous men&amp;quot; recalled by ex-inmate George Harsh in Paul Brickhill&amp;#039;s original account. Yet they&amp;#039;re a bang to watch, partly because their competitive eagerness to shine as actors makes their characters&amp;#039; collaborative spirit seem like a real achievement--with Coburn&amp;#039;s already well-developed brio overcoming even his ridiculous Aussie accent, and Bronson sensibly treating his Polish one as if it&amp;#039;s just an interesting new way to be taciturn. (Known in its simplest form as the &amp;quot;Canadian gambit,&amp;quot; this kind of ploy was always good for smuggling U. S. stars into stories that, like the actual Great Escape, were mighty short on Yanks in reality.) Meanwhile, their less glamorous British counterparts supply helpful gravitas--while being, if anything, even more at home with the essentially schoolboyish nature of the proceedings. Even so, Steve McQueen is the reason people remember The Great Escape--and what makes that funny is that he&amp;#039;s the most preposterous thing in it. While the other characters are composites, his role as the Cooler King was invented more or less from whole cloth, and it shows; whenever he appears, the movie tosses any pretense of grim realism out the window, turning openly cartoonish and swaggering instead. Yet his performance, by which I mean his star turn, is its only real claim to greatness--greatness of a peculiarly Hollywoodish sort. Otherwise, the movie is enjoyably well-done without being particularly inspired, Sturges being the sort of journeyman for whom lack of imagination was a plus in shepherding along a big action picture like this one. Except for Elmer Bernstein&amp;#039;s chirrupy music, the movie&amp;#039;s only stroke of near genius is that myth-of-Sisyphus business with the baseball--one of those echt-Hollywood gimmicks that people remember all their lives. When you think of all the tiresome speeches about man&amp;#039;s indomitable spirit that the sound of it going ca-thunk makes unnecessary, you&amp;#039;re helplessly grateful to whoever thought it up. For all I know, McQueen did; he could be shrewd about what worked for him. One reason he&amp;#039;s the movie&amp;#039;s linchpin is that he was always less a man&amp;#039;s man than a real boy&amp;#039;s boy, as if he&amp;#039;d achieved macho without ever quite passing through puberty. The giveaway is that he&amp;#039;s usually happier playing love scenes with gizmos than with people: the motorbike here, the engine room in The Sand Pebbles, cars any time his directors let him. (Even in his change-of-pace role in The Thomas Crown Affair, he&amp;#039;s gadget happy--and seemingly intrigued by Faye Dunaway only because he&amp;#039;s noticed she&amp;#039;s got moving parts.) In The Great Escape, he&amp;#039;s often awkward in dialogue scenes; clearly self-conscious about playing opposite a polished British pro like Attenborough, he covers his discomfort by hamming things up. But when he&amp;#039;s alone, wordlessly engaged in pure behavior--just sizing things up or mulling his next move--he defines what screen presence is all about. As he&amp;#039;s led back to solitary near the end, he&amp;#039;s got a moment when he looks up at the camp&amp;#039;s new kommandant and licks his chops at the prospect of making this joker&amp;#039;s life hell; it&amp;#039;s just a flicker, but the glint of joyous, half-cracked obstinacy in his eyes is an epiphany. Tom Cruise would trade away his career to be McQueen for those few seconds. That scene, too, is a boy&amp;#039;s fantasy, of course--more fit for summer camp than prison camp. But I&amp;#039;ve never believed that boyish fantasies are necessarily puerile. Thanks to McQueen and Sturges, I spent my shlubby adolescence imagining that I was making a baseball go ca-thunk against a wall, waiting only for the day when I could swipe a motorcycle and defy the sign reading achtung and halt. Thirty-plus years later, I see that nothing&amp;#039;s changed--except that now I wonder whether, unbeknownst to me, that day has come and gone and I have already obeyed it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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