The Great Escape (1963)
Directed by John Sturges
The Nazis, exasperated at the number of escapes from their prison camps by a relatively small number of Allied prisoners, relocate them to a high-security 'escape-proof' camp to sit out the remainder of the war. Undaunted, the prisoners plan one of the most ambitious escape attempts of World War II. Based on a true story.
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What critics compared The Great Escape to
No one who remembers "Stalag 17" will have to guess at the number that's on the front of the hen house, and no veteran of "The Great Escape" will fail to recognize the contours of the farm, complete with barbed wire fencing, barking dogs, and a suspicious Mr. Tweedy checking the locks and muttering about what the chickens are up to.
What follows is a tribute to The Great Escape, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and even a quick glimpse of Star Trek.
The first full-length feature from Aardman Studios, creators of the absurdly dry Wallace & Gromit shorts as well as the sublime Creature Comforts, Chicken Run is essentially a remake of The Great Escape except here it's corpulent hens looking for freedom from a muddy and dank egg farm in the British outlands.
This is The Great Escape with chickens, and herein lie the limitations.
If the overall storyline of Chicken Run strikes a vague chord of familiarity, that's because it borrows loosely from the classic World War 2 adventure, The Great Escape.
As you can tell, just trying to describe “Chicken Run” can put one into the state of euphoric silliness that must have engulfed Park and Lord when they first thought of redoing “The Great Escape” with silicone-and-Plasticine chickens.
The final act is derivative to a fault (think “The Great Escape” or “The Grand Illusion” with a few more big explosions), but the apes’ perseverance freshens up the formula.
As in episodes one through three of the “Star Wars” franchise, Reeves is operating in revisionist-prequel mode, filling in the calamitous backstory that leads to a depressing present reality — except that in this case, he’s less concerned with mythology, approaching this chapter as an elaborate homage to such manly classics as “The Great Escape,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Apocalypse Now,” starring monkeys.
"War for the Planet of the Apes" references many films - "The Great Escape," "Apocalypse Now" and "The Searchers" to name a few - but its larger grasp is historical, a new civilization forming as an old one wanes.
“We watched The Great Escape.
“War” follows their long journey through the woods until it shifts in its second half to a riveting prison camp thriller, with heavy overtones of previous war films, from “Apocalypse Now” to “The Great Escape.”
There’s even a slice of “The Great Escape” thrown in as the knuckle-dragging prisoners scheme to outwit their upright captors.
The toys want out, and the movie promptly becomes an homage to escape films like "The Great Escape."
The film’s most inspired section is a brilliant, thrilling Woody-led version of “The Great Escape,” with a junkyard climax that may actually be too scary for sensitive little ones.
How does a G-rated family film become a sophisticated combination of “The Great Escape” and “Animal Farm” without going over young people’s heads?
What follows is a massively complicated, and ever escalating escape attempt (with nods to classics like The Great Escape), which culminates in an extraordinary sequence inside a giant trash disposal device.
It becomes a straight-up prison-camp escape picture -- modeled very consciously on classic films like "Stalag 17," "The Great Escape" and "Cool Hand Luke," right down to the music -- with the evil warden taking the form of a good-ol'-boy stuffed animal named Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear (voiced to perfection by Ned Beatty).
Better to enjoy Toy Story 3 as a well-executed action yarn, a sort of cartoon version of The Great Escape , even if the film’s admittedly thrilling set pieces—like the opening, which features Woody and Buzz chasing a thieving Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head and trying to save a runaway train filled with hilariously squealing toy trolls—are more referential than satiric, feeling as if they’ve sprung less from the imagination of a young boy than from the minds of grown men with much affection for the collected works of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Michael Bay, and Peter Jackson.
When someone states that he heard that Rick was up for the Steve McQueen part in the great WWII flick The Great Escape, we’re treated to an actual scene from the film, with Rick appearing as Hilts instead of the King of Cool.
He says he was up for McQueen's part in The Great Escape (1963).
There are flashbacks, including an amusing and possibly embellished vignette to a run-in Cliff had with Bruce Lee (Mike Moh); an alt-reality scene from The Great Escape starring Rick in the Steve McQueen role; a narrator who pops up startlingly to give a clarification early on, then disappears again until the end; one- or two-scene appearances by a cavalcade of actors — Kurt Russell, Timothy Olyphant, Luke Perry, Bruce Dern, Michael Madsen, Damian Lewis, Dakota Fanning, Rumer Willis, Scoot McNairy, Margaret Qualley, etc., etc. — some based on real people, some not.
One of the things that ...Hollywood does best is to invisibly drift into flashbacks and fantasies, virtually none of which are clearly marked out: only Rick's daydreams about the time when he was in contention for Steve McQueen's role in The Great Escape for about ten seconds are obviously marked out as separate from the overall flow of images, and that's primarily because the digital witchery used to place DiCaprio into the 1963 film isn't quite ready for prime time.
Reference-spotters, in particular, will have a field day, and Tarantino has a lot of fun with film and TV history, inventing his own Rick Dalton-starring movies with real-life equivalents, as well as using some flawless effects work to insert DiCaprio into real-life films and movies such as The Great Escape or an episode of The FBI. (It's worth pointing out that there's a wealth of trivia related to each of these moments, such as the fact that Dalton was at least partly based on Burt Reynolds, who DiCaprio replaces in the FBI episode).
Tarantino and his editor Fred Raskin, along with the help of cinematographer Robert Richardson’s 35mm photography, coolly craft a film that takes numerous tangents to show admiration for works like The Great Escape (1963), C.C. and Company (1970), and FBI (which ran from 1965 to 1974) without ever feeling superfluous, despite a daunting 161-minute run time.
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Accomplished with very little dialogue and unexpected humor under the circumstances, it's an escape from a Russian prison by Cruise's Ethan Hunt (first seen throwing a ball against a wall, in likely homage to Steve McQueen in The Great Escape) orchestrated electronically from the outside by the one other holdover from the last film's team, Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg).
For instance, the film opens with a scene from "The Sting," followed by ones from "Get Smart," "The Great Escape," "The Fugitive," the "Bourne" adventures, and a penultimate sequence from both "Goldfinger" and "Monsters, Inc."
There’s a lot to admire here about how the Duffers blend their converging storylines into a propulsive The Great Escape-meets-Children of Men mashup sequence.
This one is still focused on kidnapping children, but this time in the style of The Great Escape.
Robin realizes they can use The Great Escape as a template (“I like Dick”), but they need to get inside the barracks.
Imagine a version of “The Great Escape” in which John Sturges decided to have Steve McQueen, cool personified, and his ragtag multinational group of breakout artists on-screen for 45 minutes or so, focusing the rest of the plot on the briefly seen Nazis killed in a drive-by at a French cafe after the Allied escape.
Where “Defiance’’ was a dramatic slog hamstrung by its faithfulness to history, though, “Inglourious Basterds’’ is just the opposite: a manically playful revenge fantasia made from the spare parts of Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns and strapping World War II action flicks like “The Great Escape’’ and Enzo Castellari’s 1978 “The Inglorious Bastards,’’ from which Tarantino has mangled his title and much of his plot.
Judging from the previews, and knowing Tarantino´s sense of style, I figured we´d get a film close to "Kelly´s Heroes," "The Great Escape," or "Stalag 17." Granted, he may have stolen bits and pieces of that technique, but in no way does it come close to those great films.
In an impeccably constructed opening sequence as indebted to spaghetti Westerns as it is to WWII classics like The Great Escape , a French farmer suspected of harboring Jews (Denis Menochet) is interrogated by an SS officer, Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz).
John Sturges, director of 1960's The Magnificent Seven , also made – deep breath – Bad Day at Black Rock , Gunfight at the OK Corral , The Great Escape and Ice Station Zebra among other classics.
Fuqua's directing counterpart from the 1960 film was John Sturges, who helmed "The Great Escape" --- a classic World War II adventure with McQueen, Bronson and Coburn --- plus iconic westerns "Bad Day at Black Rock" and "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral".
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Prison escape films are often fun because we understand the layout and can follow along as the heroes attempt their breakout (the 1963 WWII classic The Great Escape remains the undisputed king of the genre).
Where the most enjoyable films in the genre succeed -- movies like "The Great Escape" and "Escape From Alcatraz" -- it's in the way the filmmaker nurses the suspense of the story along, repeatedly surprising the audience and always keeping the emphasis on the grand escape we know is coming.
Anyway, with a cinematic nod to The Great Escape , the chase is on as the foxes and other assorted critters tunnel down to escape the looming danger, learning en route that an appreciation of their separate skills will promote their collective survival.