User reviews

I am a retired history teacher and LOVE when films stick close to the original facts in a story. So, when I saw that the bonus disc for "The Great Escape" had this featurette about the historical aspects of the film, I was excited. However, as this short film was VERY short and spent much of the time talking about HOW the feature film was brought into being, it really didn't answer enough questions for me about how close the film was to the actual real-life escape. What they did talk about, however, was great--I just wanted so much more. If you do watch, it addresses how they combined/condensed characters for cinematic reasons, how they got the technical details of how to build a prisoner of war camp as well as why they ultimately decided to make the film in Germany.

Worth seeing but just not enough. It's part of multi-part documentary--all of which together are well worth seeing. And, fortunately, some of my complaints about needing more info about the historical accuracy WAS addressed in the second one "Preparations for Freedom".

Great Escape, The: Bringing Fact to Fiction (2001)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

When MGM finally got around to delivering a Special Edition for THE GREAT ESCAPE, a four-part documentary was made and this is the first part. We start off hearing a few facts about the original escape and how director John Sturges spent years trying to get the rights. Once he did get the rights he couldn't find a studio willing to make the picture until after THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN became a hit and MGM finally green lit the project. Burt Reynalds narrates with John Weir (camp escapee), Alex Cassie (camp escapee), Jonathan Vance (author), Robert Relya and Arthur Duand are among the people interviewed. For the most part this is a fairly lackluster document because you really don't get to know too much. Yes, what stories are told are fascinating but at the same time you simply don't get that much information. The most interesting stories is about how they wanted to get the camp to look authentic and what they did to get this done. The start of the documentary starts off talking about how they had to add certain aspects of fiction to complete the movie but even here they don't go into much detail.