Rich Man’s M*A*S*H, it uses the same dark-comedic tone but puts it to much greater effect
★★★★★
When you’ve been watching and discussing movies with the same people for over 7+ years you end up with a common vocabulary. Today, I get to talk to you cinemateurs about a term we use, a ‘perfect film’. A perfect film is a movie that accomplishes everything it sets out to do. It has minor flaws (everything will) but should be seen as a triumph by the cast and crew. It is the exact wrong candidate for a film to be remade, even though they often are. It doesn’t even necessarily need to be a 5-star movie (to me, these are movies I can watch again and again). It may not be the perfect movie for you, but it accomplishes almost exactly what the filmmakers set out to do. Some examples of perfect movies include (this is all my opinion and in no way definitive unless I am trying to win an argument): Die Hard, Silence of the Lambs, Robocop, Jurassic Park, Ocean’s Eleven, Cabin in the Woods, Let the Right One In, and The Great Escape.
The Great Escape is a 1963 WWII movie directed by John Sturges set in a German-run POW camp. It’s 3 hour-long runtime is daunting, but worth it. The POWs are a group of ‘rotten eggs’ with a storied history of escaping from similar camps. The Germans decide to place all of these men into one camp, because what could possibly go wrong with that? In the first few minutes, the camp’s warden lays out the challenge in front of our heroes: he explains how this camp was built to be inescapable, and provides the officers with reasons not to escape (they have a library, sports, and a rec hall). As the title suggests, the men not only escape, but they do it in a great fashion.
David had to have known when he assigned this to me, that this was a tall order. I was expecting a campy Hogan’s Heroes style movie that glorifies the wit of the allied soldiers in desperate times. I mean, everyone knows the Great Escape theme. It’s like a patriotic version of Whistle While You Work. Combine that catchy upbeat tune with a cast known more for westerns and over-the-top action films than Best Picture nominees, and I was expecting to see a bunch of plucky war heroes to pull one over on those pesky Germans. What I got instead was a movie that perfectly blended the absurdity of war with all of its darkness.
Firstly, this movie was based on the true account of a prison break at Stalag Luft III. The characters the movie chose to focus on are probably composites, but they are rich characters that you don’t mind being stuck in prison with. The characters toe the line between foolish and brave with their repeated attempts at escape. There’s a nobility to their willingness to give up on the cushy life as a POW to try and return to the war front. There are also sympathetic characters on both sides of the barb wire fence. The first act of this movie is where Sturges plays with a dark comedic tone, similar to the TV show M*A*S*H. I was really digging the vibe (? to avoid repetition), but I wasn’t really looking forward to 3 hours of it. I was afraid that because this movie came out pre-Deer Hunter and pre-Platoon that the movie would be lacking any serious stakes. After all, I know they escape right? I was dead wrong.
What really turned this movie into a perfect movie for me was the way the plot starts to wear on all of these confident military officers. Sturges manages to use tone to convey the psyche of all of the main characters. Slowly they start to unravel, as the weight of failed escape attempts begins to take its tole on the soldiers. As they do the movie progress into darker and darker territories. By the time the first casualty happens, I had been lulled into low-stakes mode and was jerked back to reality. Charles Bronson wasn’t going to pull out a magnum and go Deathwish on the Nazis. Steve McQueen’s mustang was no where to be found. No one was riding off into the sunset with Grace Kelly. This was a movie about WWII. While I just told you what doesn’t happen, I don’t want to dig too much into what does happen, as it caught me by surprise and I want you to experience that too. But almost every minute of this movie is used expertly by Sturges to first set a feint and then stab you in the gut. It’s the flawlessness in which he delivers the blow that makes this movie perfect.
The Great Escape is currently available to stream on Netflix.
Next week, I’ve given David Chasing Amy, the most highbrow of the Kevin Smith oeuvre. David had seen Clerks, Mallrats and Dogma, but Chasing Amy was missing from his mind-database. I think seeing the range Kevin Smith has makes the rest of his work even better. He’s the comedic David Lynch. He can make typically great movies, but chooses to instead make movies he loves. Come back next Tuesday to read David’s take on Chasing Amy.
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