By Ray Bennett
John Sturges’s terrific prisoner-of-war adventure ‘The Great Escape’ is an annual treat around this time of year and remained great entertainment when I watched it on BBC-TV for the enth time. Elmer Bernstein’s splendid score was the first film soundtrack recording I ever bought and it is still thrilling. For me, too, some of the best scenes, which actually enhance the drama and chase sequences, are quiet ones between James Garner, as Hendley, the scrounger, and British actor Donald Pleasance playing forger Blythe, who loses his sight.
There appears to be genuine chemistry between the two actors and when I interviewed Garner in the Seventies, he agreed. ‘I felt so,’ he said. ‘I loved it! I just think Donald is so marvellous and it was a good relationship. We got to do some things on our own in there.’
Garner lauded director Sturges for being very accommodating. ‘He was very good about that,’ he said. ‘As long as we stuck to the point of it, we could change a little dialogue. I wrote about three scenes in the picture. They were small character things, you know, like the stealing of the equipment they needed for the forgeries.’
A poignant sequence in the film is when Hendley suspects and then sees that Blythe is going blind. ‘I really loved working with Donald,’ Garner told me. ‘As a matter of fact, John apologised profusely to me because there were two scenes that you never saw that were really absolutely wonderful. Donald was fantastic and they were beautifully shot and everything but they were left on the cutting-room floor so we could get Steve McQueen on his motorcycle.’
Garner was pragmatic about what made the film so exciting. ‘That turned out to be, I guess, the right thing to do,’ he said, ‘but it would have been better for Donald and me to keep those scenes. You have to look at the picture as a whole and it was the right thing to do: get McQueen on that bike.’
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How quiet scenes help make ‘The Great Escape’ so thrilling
By Ray Bennett
John Sturges’s terrific prisoner-of-war adventure ‘The Great Escape’ is an annual treat around this time of year and remained great entertainment when I watched it on BBC-TV for the enth time. Elmer Bernstein’s splendid score was the first film soundtrack recording I ever bought and it is still thrilling. For me, too, some of the best scenes, which actually enhance the drama and chase sequences, are quiet ones between James Garner, as Hendley, the scrounger, and British actor Donald Pleasance playing forger Blythe, who loses his sight.
There appears to be genuine chemistry between the two actors and when I interviewed Garner in the Seventies, he agreed. ‘I felt so,’ he said. ‘I loved it! I just think Donald is so marvellous and it was a good relationship. We got to do some things on our own in there.’
Garner lauded director Sturges for being very accommodating. ‘He was very good about that,’ he said. ‘As long as we stuck to the point of it, we could change a little dialogue. I wrote about three scenes in the picture. They were small character things, you know, like the stealing of the equipment they needed for the forgeries.’
A poignant sequence in the film is when Hendley suspects and then sees that Blythe is going blind. ‘I really loved working with Donald,’ Garner told me. ‘As a matter of fact, John apologised profusely to me because there were two scenes that you never saw that were really absolutely wonderful. Donald was fantastic and they were beautifully shot and everything but they were left on the cutting-room floor so we could get Steve McQueen on his motorcycle.’
Garner was pragmatic about what made the film so exciting. ‘That turned out to be, I guess, the right thing to do,’ he said, ‘but it would have been better for Donald and me to keep those scenes. You have to look at the picture as a whole and it was the right thing to do: get McQueen on that bike.’
Screenshot