Dreams of Flight

"The Great Escape" in American Film and Culture

Dana Polan

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780520379299
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520976610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The first full-length study of the iconic 1960s film The Great Escape and its place in Hollywood and American history.

Escaped POW Virgil Hilts (Steve McQueen) on a stolen motorcycle jumps an imposing barbed wire fence—caught on film, the act and its aftermath have become an unforgettable symbol of triumph as well as defeat for 1960s America. Combining production and reception history with close reading, Dreams of Flight offers the first full-length study of The Great Escape, the classic film based on a true story of Allied prisoners who hatched an audacious plan to divert and thwart the Wehrmacht and escape into the nearby countryside.

Through breezy prose and pithy analysis, Dana Polan centers The Great Escape within American cultural and intellectual history, drawing a vivid picture of the country in the 1960s. We see a nation grappling with its own military history, a society undergoing significant shifts in its culture and identity, and a film industry in transition from Old Hollywood's big-budget runaway studio films to the slow interior cinema of New Hollywood. Dreams of Flight combines this context with fan anecdotes and a close study of filmic style to bring readers into the film and trace its wide-reaching influence. Polan examines the production history, including prior adaptations in radio and television of celebrated author Paul Brickhill's original nonfiction book about the escape, and he compares the cinematic fiction to the real events of the escape in 1944. Dreams of Flight also traces the afterlife of The Great Escape in the many subsequent movies, TV commercials, and cartoons that reference it, whether reverentially or with humor.

1

Engineering The Great Escape

FROM BOOK TO FILM (AND IN BETWEEN)

In 1950, Paul Brickhill, who had been a POW at Stalag Luft 3, published his dramatic book-length account, The Great Escape, and it became a best seller; thirteen years later, a Hollywood rendition of the story was released and it became a blockbuster. We tend to imagine adaptation between narrative forms—book to film, for example—in terms of a simple polarity, a fixed origin (for example, a source book) and a fixed endpoint (the film version, for instance) with possibilities from one to the other of fidelity or deviation, creative interpretation, productive reinvention, and so on. For many film scholars, adaptation study as it was traditionally enacted was a sort of bleak affair, because it was so mechanical and predictable: you lined up the source and its derivation and then scored the latter for what it got right—or wrong. Yet, beyond the seeming polarity of original source and transformed or transformative derivations, there’s actually, often, open-ended instability and dispersion. Adaptation is endless transformation, as the original work passes from the initial inspiration to ongoing elaboration, and as later versions undergo revisions and reworkings of their own. To take just one aspect of this complex process that we’ll elaborate later on, beyond the seeming endpoint of the film of The Great Escape that actually got made (which itself went through myriad iterations with multiple screenplays and imaginative casting decisions and revisions, as we’ll see), a sort of ongoing process of adaptation continues with other films and other works of popular culture that reference The Great Escape and provide it with a resonant afterlife that can then rebound on the earlier work itself and interfere, perhaps, with our memory of it and our original experience of it. To take an obvious example, whatever one thinks of the digital insertion of Leonardo di Caprio into a scene from The Great Escape in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in . . . Hollywood (2019), it is now, for better or worse, part of the culture of The Great Escape, mixing its own meanings into the earlier film. (When I mentioned this book project to friends and colleagues, they often asked if I knew of and would be attending to the Tarantino reworking.)

“It really happened”

Yet, in pinpointing the inevitable instabilities of adaptation with regard to the history of The Great Escape, it is important to recognize that, beyond the ongoing correction of the historical record itself (as seen in the flood of “true story” books I discuss in the appendix), the seeming literary starting point, Brickhill’s nonfiction saga, bears its own instabilities. It’s not just the film that was revisited and revised, but also the original history as Brickhill observed it, reworked it, wrote it up (several times, as we’ll see), and then found his own initial efforts open to further revision and inventive adaptation by later writers of the escape’s history. In fact, while specifically a work with nonfiction claims (“it really happened”), or maybe even because of those claims, which required a search for language adequate to complex events, Brickhill’s book already is an adaptation, taking the flux of history and converting it into verbal form—and doing so in pointedly dramatic fashion.

PAUL BRICKHILL AND THE GREAT ESCAPE

Paul Brickhill was born in Melbourne in 1916, then moved with his family to Sydney, where his father was a famous journalist. Following in his dad’s footsteps, Brickhill had a successful career as a newspaperman: through his best friend Peter Finch, eventually to become famous as an actor, Brickhill got an internship at the Sydney Sun, where Finch had a similar entry position. Finch, already rebelling against pressures to conform to the rules and regulations of the regular workday, soon dropped out. But Brickhill persisted, becoming one of the paper’s top reporters (specializing notably in aviation news) and then serving as one of its editors. As a reporter, he evidently honed skills for concise but captivating mini-portraits of those involved in the reported events, even to the point of being beaten to first edition by rival newspapers that didn’t wait to refine the story for that deeper dramatic effect that Brickhill felt should be centered on characters, their background history, and their motivations.

With the declaration of war, Brickhill—always interested in aviation, though with little or no gung ho attitude about warfare itself—enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force and then evidently was disappointed, as were many Australian flyers, to be posted to the European theater of war rather than billeted in Australia as a would-be defender of his homeland. A fighter pilot, Brickhill was shot down over Tunisia in 1943 and eventually ended up at Stalag Luft 3. Initially assigned, because his skills as a journalist had included the talent of shorthand, to help transcribe BBC broadcasts for dissemination to POWs throughout the camp, Brickhill came to play more important roles in the escape itself. Brickhill helped organize the team of “stooges,” whose task it was to keep track of the German guards’ movements in and around Stalag Luft 3, and this occupation enabled him to range all over the camp, meet lots of participants in the escape attempt, and thereby collect multiple accounts of the project from multiple perspectives and, importantly, at first hand. (One distinguishing dramatic talent of Brickhill is his ability to imagine or reconstruct dialogue and the presumed sentiment of this or that player in consequential events.) Brickhill also tried to help in tunnel digging but had to give that up quickly when he realized he was afflicted with extreme claustrophobia. Eventually, he was put in charge of the specific stooge operation of looking out for those German “ferrets” (guards who roamed the camp, searching everywhere for signs of escape) who risked getting too close to the hut particularly devoted to the complicated operations of document forgers. The forgers had to work near unblinded windows with enough light by which to copy and create facsimiles, and that made them vulnerable to discovery. For his efforts, Brickhill was himself assigned a place in the escape but was taken off the list by Roger Bushell (the escape plot’s leader) because of his claustrophobia.¹

Importantly, for the history of adaptation, The Great Escape was in fact not Brickhill’s first book on the event. During his imprisonment, Brickhill worked with a South African, Conrad Norton, also a journalist before the war, as a teammate in the BBC transcription operation at Stalag Luft 3. Relying on their journalistic experience, the two men began to collect exciting stories of the downing of UK pilots and their capture and any escape attempts they made, and they released their accounts as a book, Escape to Danger, in 1946.² In fact, despite its title, a great deal of the first part of the book came from Norton’s interviews with fellow prisoners that concentrated mostly on stories of men shot down, surviving, and being captured (and not on their subsequent escape). Norton was most interested in how men ended up at the camps and not how they might get out. (The first sections are quite enamored of wild stories of men who fall without parachutes and yet live—for example, by grabbing in flight at someone with an open parachute and wafting down together or landing on a snow-covered mountain and sliding all the way down, the fall being broken that way.) Conversely, Brickhill’s work as a stooge (and however briefly as a digger in the tunnel) gave him first-person access to the big escape operation itself, and he was able to write about that in a way Norton couldn’t. The book seems curiously bifurcated, with initial short chapters (primarily by Norton) of amazing feats of survival and capture and then a long chapter (primarily by Brickhill) that chronicles the March 24 escape.

The coauthored book anticipates Brickhill’s solitary effort in The Great Escape but stands apart from it. On one hand, the two authors provide a multiplicity of exciting narratives with that striking break between small stories of downing and capture and the one big story of the escape. On the other hand, Escape to Danger offers much more description (of the look of people and places) than The Great Escape and provides ongoing commentary on broader events transpiring beyond the prison camps (especially how the war was going and how that impacted numbers of downed flyers). Norton seems to have had a sociological bent—after the war, he wrote on the political scene in South Africa—so maybe the broader context came from him. Here and there, Brickhill’s The Great Escape picks up sentences from the earlier collaborative book, but with no acknowledgment of Norton. The latter book also abridges the multiplicity of tales to concentrate, in exciting narrative fashion, on the one “great” escape—told, as mentioned above, through imagined dialogue and imputed inner feelings of those directly involved in the event. Notoriously, Escape to Danger had included pages on POWs who didn’t want to rock the boat and therefore opposed escape attempts, but Brickhill removed any hint of dissent or downright resistance in his revision of the story into The Great Escape. Evidently, Brickhill and Norton agreed that each of them should have exclusive copyright to the sections they had written, so Brickhill was free to do as he wished with his focused and extended chronicle of the mass escape and could turn it into a full book of his own.

As the escape tunnels were being constructed, escape chief Roger Bushell had the thought that there should be some visual record of what the builders were doing. Frequent blackouts at the camp meant that photography would be an unpredictable means of recording (and anyway, the POWs’ smuggled-in camera was in continuous use for passport and identity card purposes), so prisoner Ley Kenyon, who had been an art teacher before the war, was dispatched to make sketches in the tunnels—which, because of the cramped space, he had to do on his back, using the ceiling of the tunnels as an upside-down table. Kenyon, not part of the escape itself, eventually would hide the sketches in a tin in one of the unused tunnels, where they remained until after the war, when they were pulled up and returned to their creator, who made them available to Norton and Brickhill. The sketches served as powerful illustrations, first in their collaborative book and then in Brickhill’s stand-alone The Great Escape.

The tragedy of “the Fifty” escapees (out of seventy-six) who were summarily shot by the Germans after they were recaptured led the British government to encourage prisoners of the Axis powers to give up on escape attempts and wait out the war’s end (a recommendation intensified only a few months after the March escape when the Normandy invasion of June suggested the war might soon come to an end).³ Thus, like his fellow POWs, Brickhill was present at Stalag Luft 3 when, with the end of war approaching, the German administration of the camp decided in 1945 to enact a grueling mass exodus of prisoners, a veritable “death march” that did in many POWs and weighed heavily on survivors through the rest of their lives (Brickhill himself would likely now be diagnosed with PTSD). Brickhill smuggled the manuscript notes that he and Conrad Norton had compiled, and these eventually served for his two books on Stalag Luft 3. Escape to Danger was well received, yet without making any sort of splash. But the revision of this material into The Great Escape, published in 1950, garnered tremendous success for Brickhill, who became one of the utmost best-selling authors of the postwar period (he himself would claim that The Great Escape was second after The Iliad in breaking a million sales in the UK paperback market).

Indeed, on the strength of a widely received BBC talk, a Reader’s Digest short nonfiction story, and draft material that he would circulate (all of which gave him sole credit, without Norton), Brickhill had quickly secured a literary agent and publishers for UK and US editions of The Great Escape. Strikingly, these anticipations of what would become his most famous book also brought him to the attention of the commanders of the 617 Squadron who had been looking for someone to write the history of their aviation unit, especially the famous raid on the Ruhr valley dams.⁴ Thus, by the end of the 1940s, Brickhill had contracts for two war books, The Great Escape and The Dam Busters, and he worked on them simultaneously. Research for The Great Escape brought him to North America, where he filled in much of the drama from interviews with former POWs Wally Floody and George Harsh (who would pen the book’s introduction), and to Germany, where he would follow up on investigations into the murder of the Fifty.

Joined by Reach for the Sky (Brickhill’s rousing 1954 account of RAF pilot Douglas Bader, who had lost both legs in a flying accident in the 1930s yet flew anyway in World War II and attempted a thrilling escape after being shot down), The Great Escape and The Dam Busters made Brickhill a celebrity in the United Kingdom. (A volume commissioned by the RAF Escaping Society, Escape or Die, offering a set of tales of capture and escape, had a more limited distribution, mainly to Society members, and wasn’t as key to Brickhill’s intense notoriety on the 1950s popular literary scene.) Pointedly, three of his books have the word escape in the title, as if to identify Brickhill closely with a particular strand of war narrative. At the same time, three of his books, the best sellers The Great Escape, The Dam Busters, and Reach for the Sky, offer primarily a single overall narrative line centered on one resilient, unflagging hero (as opposed to Escape or Die or Escape to Danger, which offer diverse tales with a multiplicity of protagonists) and were therefore well constructed for adaptation into hit movies. Two such films (The Dam Busters and Reach for the Sky) came out during the period when Brickhill was being celebrated as a household name in resounding narrative nonfiction, and they added to his success. Conversely, Brickhill was already sort of forgotten by the time the hit movie The Great Escape was released.⁵

Indeed, Brickhill was never really able to build on that intense 1950s success as the years went by. The war had scarred him (he would not travel again by air), and he went through a painful divorce in the 1960s. All of this took its toll, and he became depressive and reclusive, mental debilities tha...

Table of contents

• Subvention
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1.   Engineering The Great Escape
• 2.   Tunneling In
• 3.   Afterlives
• Coda
• Appendix: “It Really Happened”
• Notes
• Index