Movies for Memorial Day

I’ve always liked war movies. There was a slew of them made about World War II in the 50’s and 60’s--some of them classics and some rather forgettable. As a kid I remember watching TNT on Memorial Day. They along with TBS used to play them back to back all day. I've seen a lot of greats that way. Commercial breaks during TV films were always annoying, but more so now that I stream so much. The minute I get it in my head to go to a movie on broadcast TV, one long string of ads is enough to break my habit. The commercial breaks aren’t evenly spaced either, I assume they still do it like that. You get a long beginning punctuated by a few commercials and by the end of the movie, it’s the opposite. Only someone with no other option sticks with a film until the end. Hospital patients come to mind.

I settled in to watch The Great Escape Monday night. I’m amazed by how well it holds up today. Good stories do that, they survive even after the color fades from the reels. The Great Escape is less a war movie than a caper/heist film. It’s a lot closer to Ocean’s Eleven than The Longest Day. What makes Ocean’s Eleven great (at least I think it’s great)? Colorful characters with unique skill sets and a specific plan established at the beginning. We know what the mission is so we aren’t surprised to see them work it out over the course of the movie. The Dirty Dozen has some elements of this too. But The Great Escape uses the war as a set piece. Because the men are cut off, the audience has no idea how the war effort is going. Soldiers complain to each other about their imprisonment but we don’t get long expositions on Hitler or the Nazis or successful battles. 

Since these guys are in a camp, their world is confined to planning, tunneling, and escaping detection. We're aware the inside politics from the German side. The Luftwaffe manages the camp instead of the SS, making it decent as far as prison is concerned. The SS were brutal thugs; having them as overseers would’ve been much worse. Captain Ramsey (James Donald) and Roger Bartlett (Richard Attenborough) discuss this very thing. Steve Mcqueen plays the 'cooler king' based loosely on an American pilot named William Ash. He steals every scene. He's just a great actor. 

Apparently the film takes liberties with the historical details of the escape itself. That’s a nice way of saying, there was a true escape but the details are fiction. But it’s a fun watch and doesn’t feel old in the way that some movies do. I mentioned the The Longest Day already but that one feels dated. It’s too big and too long. It tries to cover a lot of information but ends up looking like a documentary. We see A-list actors for a couple of minutes, John Wayne explaining the click device, Robert Mitchum on the beach, Henry Fonda taking fire, but we miss out on the granular story. The scenes of the men storming the beachhead at Normandy are impressive. The overhead continuous shot, was a first for its day, but it feels like a brilliant work of photography and not an emotional event.

It’s a grand spectacle that nails it historically but stays above the grubbiness of human misery. It’s ironic that The Longest Day covers literally one day and feels like 6 months; The Great Escape covers at least 6 months and feels like a week. I don’t mean to say it doesn’t stand up as a quality movie, it certainly does. As film making goes it’s incredible. But modern audiences want to know a character or group of characters and watch them grow through the ordeal.

I can’t imagine how I used to watch a 3 hour movie like that with all the commercial interruptions. No way would I do that anymore. What I’ll do instead is find as many old war movies as possible and catch up. I don’t think I’ve seen Midway yet and that’s supposed to be a Classic. A lot of these I’ve seen in bits and pieces. They run all day and unfortunately they run together in my memory.  I’ve never watched Tora! Tora! Tora! either and that one is supposedly a must.

I'll have to make this a once per month thing instead of once per year.