Light On Dark Water

Weekend Music (and Movie)

I admit that I'm posting this music mainly because I wanted to say something about the movie, which I watched in three segments over the past week or so. It's almost three hours long, and I had trouble finding a single stretch of time to watch it.

I tend to assume everyone has seen it and knows the story, but in case that's not true: it's a dramatization, said to be accurate in its essentials, of the attempted escape of Allied prisoners of war from a German prison camp in World War II. Since my assumption is certainly not true, I'll avoid spoiling the plot.

It was released in 1963, and I saw it on that first run, which means I would have been 14 or 15, 16 at most. It stirred me deeply, and I have a vague idea that it affected my friends that way, too. I saw it a second time, but I'm not sure when that was–whether it was while the movie was still in theaters on that first run, or a few years later on some re-release–but it moved me just as much. I hadn't seen it since, and have been wanting to.

I'm more critical of it now–as with all war movies of the time, it cleaned up and glamorized the heroes, for instance. And there were some things about the escape that  seemed less than completely plausible to me, but as those facts are supposed to be more or less accurate, perhaps that's my problem. And it is a Hollywood movie, so subtlety is not its strong point. The American actors are like most American actors of the time, playing the same basic personae that they always played. But they are among the most engaging of that generation: James Garner, James Coburn, and especially Steve McQueen. The English actors, including Richard Attenborough and Donald Pleasence, are typically superb, and perhaps that can be considered a bit of revenge for the fact that the actual escape on which the movie was based was an almost entirely British affair, greatly Americanized for the movie, presumably to appeal to American audiences and American patriotism.

But in spite of any of those reservations, it remains a classic and deeply stirring portrait of courage against overwhelming odds. And we need those: not for any militaristic purpose, but for the health of our souls. It makes me think of Casablanca: whatever the artistic or journalistic deficiencies of either of them, I would suspect that there is something missing in the heart of anyone who is not moved by them.

One odd side effect of which I was only half-conscious was that the last third or so of the movie, which occurs outside the prison camp, caused me to fall in love with the look of Europe, or at least those parts of Germany in which the movie was filmed. The look of the fields, the look of the towns, above all something in the quality of the light, all haunted me afterwards. And I found, on this viewing, that the effect remains, and makes me wonder about the long-past juncture in my life when I might have emigrated to Europe.

As to the music: it's in the old quasi-classical school, and a great example of the way a real composer can re-work a motif into a great range of expression. You'll hear the irresistible main theme here, but you won't get much sense of how it's used in the more sombre parts of the film. This opening sequence is of the German trucks bearing the prisoners arriving at the camp.

 An interesting note: my wife and I have been watching the original Upstairs, Downstairs. It was slightly disconcerting to go from it to The Great Escape and find Hudson (Gordon Jackson) as a British soldier.