The Big X—Why ‘The Great Escape’ still Captures a Particularly British Christmas

(Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
Credit: By Diliff
Credit: By Diliff

For many a British household, the theme tune to John Sturges’ The Great Escape has long since become an accepted part of the soundtrack to the season of goodwill. Yet despite the fact that the cast is comprised of an equal mix of both American and British actors, one never hears about the movie being spoken of in quite the same way as a Christmas favorite across the Atlantic. Nevertheless, its evergreen popularity with British audiences would suggest there is more to the way it continues to remain part of our own festive celebrations than Dickie Attenborough demanding to know why the air pumps aren’t finished as James Coburn drawls in his best Australian accent, “Aww patience issa virtue Wodger old boy.”

Filmed in the summer of 1962, the color, energy and spirit of The Great Escape captures the post-war optimism of a Britain ready to throw off the austerity of the 1950s—between the initial outbreak of Beatlemania, and the English World Cup victory of 1966. In many ways, the film subsequently embodies a sunny nostalgia that is far more appropriate to the mood of Britain on the eve of a sexual and economic revolution, than the grim reality of Stalag Luft III from which seventy-six men made their escape in March 1944. The scene where Steve McQueen jumps his motorcycle over the German barbed wire fences, while an unlikely source of Christmas spirit, feeds into the energy of its own contemporary moment reflecting the shift towards the youth counter culture of the 1960s.

However, when one thinks of the associative connection between military conflict and Christmas, the appeal of The Great Escape runs much deeper in the British psyche than its regular showing during the holiday season. Here, the popular image of the unofficial truce between English and German troops in December 1914, along the trenches of the Western Front, is inescapable. Men from both sides exchanging gifts and letters in No Man’s Land before being forced to resume hostilities, has become a resonant image embedded in both historical narrative and popular culture. Yet although many accounts of the truce refer to a game of football, questions remain as to whether such fraternization in the form of a formal football match ever took place. Nevertheless, the power of this image and the chivalric code of honor, nobility and decency it invokes remains a key point of reference for how the British continue to imagine and represent themselves in relation to the Great War.

This is immediately evident in the opening titles of The Great Escape, where a low angle close-up hones in on a small cluster of poppies in an anonymous field. It is a brief yet poignant indication as to how, while ostensibly set during the Second World War, the popularity of The Great Escape with British audiences at Christmas owes much to the power of the Great War’s hold on the English imagination. It is with the Great War that the discourse of official commemoration becomes a touchstone of the 20th century experience. Just as the ceasefire of Christmas 1914 embodied the calm before the storm where active combat was temporarily suspended, The Great Escape evokes a similar narrative paradigm based around what is in turns both good humoured and frosty, yet for the most part, mutually respectful dialogue between both the German Luftwaffe and their British counterparts.

Consequently, what The Great Escape does for the British Christmas is encapsulate a world that is half make-believe and half historical fact. A prison camp which has all of the color and Hollywood glamor of Steve McQueen, James Garner, James Coburn and Charles Bronson in their prime, and yet still manages to convey a true story in which three escape tunnels were built under all but impossible circumstances. Richard Attenborough (as Big X), Gordon Jackson (as MacDonald Intelligence), David McCallum (as Dispersal), Donald Pleasance (as The Forger) and James Donald (as Ramsey the SBO), are all perfectly cast to exemplify the embodiment of British flem and ingenuity, be it hiding the dirt from the tunnel in their gardening allotments or taking lessons in bird-spotting to cover Donald Pleasance’s forging operation.

Moreover, the close-knit nature of Richard Attenborough’s X organization ensures that the emphasis is not simply on pathos, but the responsibility the men take on for each other. The best scenes illustrate this bond none more so than Donald Pleasance slowly going blind and trying to hide his condition from James Garner who knows his own odds of escape are terminally shortened by taking him along. It is here that the real secret as to why the film resonates so much for British audiences during the festive season lies in a message of victory rather than defeat. While Steve McQueen going full throttle towards the entire German army is as far from the historical truth as the idea of angels appearing to shepherds in the field, The Great Escape suggests the power of the imagination to defeat the dull, mundane reality of day-to-day existence. It underlines, in the language of ‘sacrifice’ as its own form of goodwill to all men, what a small group of individuals can do when they refuse to accept that they are no longer able to fight an unacceptable and despotic ideology.

The underlying appeal of The Great Escape for British audiences at Christmas continues to ask questions of not just how the Second, but also the First World War figures in the English imagination. It is a film where the American star cast doesn’t so much steal the show as play off the idea of British behavior as a uniform officer class, appealing to a post-war generation looking to build a new world in which an American, rather than British, accent begins to take precedence. It is an act of reinvention, where every Christmas, The Great Escape allows the British to indulge in the historical fantasy as well as the historical fact of how they see themselves. At the same time, the peculiar and yet oddly apt relationship between The Great Escape and a British Christmas is one, as a piece of ‘family entertainment,’ that almost serves to transcend the subject of war and reaffirms for its audience the importance of friends and loved ones.

Thus, it is in the poignant and close juxtaposition of the new and the old that Christmas by its very nature gives synthesis to both past and present. The imaginative capability to reconnect to an irrevocable history, which in The Great Escape blurs the lines between the two global conflicts of the last century, perhaps reminds a particularly English sensibility in silhouette of a distant battlefront. As the world weary Charles Ryder observes at the end of Brideshead Revisited, the idea of the soldier returning is one that implies a deeper subtext:

“Something quite remote from anything the builders intended […] a small red flame—a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem.”

If for the English The Great Escape affirms and adds to the seasonal atmosphere, it may be in this sense of ‘far from home,’ which translates from the trenches of the Western Front to the technicolor of the early 1960s, and carries the strongest appeal to an audience constantly aware of those ‘other soldiers.’ A timely Yuletide reminder that it is in the power of the imagination itself that the Christmas nativity, and the ability to fight and resist, are born.

 

 


Jonathan Jones is a freelance writer currently living and working in Rome. His main influences are Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Saki and Yann Martel. He qualified in 1999 with his M.A. in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University College, and in 2004, with an MRes in Humanities from Keele University. He now teaches writing composition at John Cabot University in Rome. 


 

New World

sunrise-at-lake-mountains-in-background-reflected-on-lakeFor most of my life, my body has been something to ignore or abuse, to punish or to make invisible. I don’t think I’m alone in this. But it wasn’t always this way.

The building blocks were assembled with tremendous care. My parents raised me to believe my body was a temple, and fed me in a way that was consistent with that belief. We were vegetarian long before it was in style. I was too young to notice how good I felt in my skin but I do remember the feeling of running until my cheeks were hot and red, and flopping down on the grass to watch the summer sky roll past.

The winter after my tenth birthday I learned to ignore my body and to try to make myself invisible. My parents divorced. The home cooked meals were traded for a stepfather in training who took far more interest in my body than I ever had. My body had hidden territories that provoked attack and made me vulnerable. I chose to live in my head. I became a reader, not a runner and wrote long stories about clean places where it was sunny and warm and people only shook hands to say I love you.

By the time I reached fifteen, I no longer bothered with the stories of my own. I slept too late to eat breakfast, was too shy to eat at school and raced home to watch my favorite soap opera. I stayed awake late into the night, watching other people’s lives and entirely avoiding the life that was mine. I had nearly achieved invisibility, so skinny I was a shadow stood sideways, and so quiet I felt sure if I never returned to school, not a soul would notice. But I was not invisible enough. I moved away from home that year, and left behind the new stereo that was my payment for being silent when the latest of my mother’s boyfriends made it a family affair.

Summer in my new place gave me the gift of wind on my face and sand under my feet, breathless sprints across the beach, safety and freedom putting blood in my veins again. I was sixteen. I stood naked in the sunshine through my open window and looked at myself in the mirror. This was someone new. I touched the curve of my hipbone and the arch of my ribs, and admired the fuzz below my belly. I was pretty, and I was whole. I fell in love with myself and I fell in love with a boy. I learned how to feel alive in all the hidden places and to share them with someone I trusted.

I could have felt betrayed when I began to throw up in the mornings, but I didn’t. I remembered how I’d begun, with my body as a temple, and I pictured the building blocks inside of me, making a beautiful, strong city in an entirely new world. I ate as well as I knew how and fell in love with my body all over again and the baby I was growing. I may have been afraid but my body knew exactly what it was doing. I gave birth naturally to a perfect baby girl, and was proud of us both from head to toe.

I can’t say when that changed, only that it did. Maybe it was the birth control pills and the resulting weight that began to creep up. Maybe it was choosing a marriage that was safety and security but not love, with my body as the bargaining chip and my self-respect as the cost. My skin became a canvas to paint with the damage I couldn’t speak about. I cut the soft places that would be hidden when I dressed, and drank to keep from walking away from it all. But sometimes I dreamed about the curve of a hipbone and the softness of a breast, the feel of lying safe and free in arms I could trust. I began to write again, to build instead of break.

It took falling in love with another woman’s body to learn to cherish my own again. I put my head against the place above her heart and felt the pulse in her belly and the curve of her hip. I traced the length of her legs and held the perfect shape of her heel against my palm. I saw the tangle of us below the sheets, breast and thigh, calves and feet and we were beautiful, scars and all.

When the sun comes through my window and I stand with my face to the glass, I see the body that carries me that carried my child that holds room for all the love I can give. It’s an entirely new world.

 


Kristen MacKenzie lives on Vashon Island in a quiet cabin where the shelves are filled with herbs for medicine-making, the floor is open for dancing, and the table faces the ocean, waiting for a writer to pick up the pen. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Rawboned, GALA, Extract(s) Daily Dose of Lit, Maudlin House, Blank Fiction, Cease, Cows, Crack the Spine, and is included monthly in Diversity Rules. Pieces are forthcoming in Bluestockings, NAILED, Minerva Rising , MadHat Annual, and Crab Fat. Her short story, Cold Comfort, placed in Honorable Mention in The Women’s National Book Association’s annual writing contest.


 

 

Two Events that Occur at The Corner of 18th And Summit in 1995

https://www.flickr.com/photos/25792994@N04/5299579966/in/photolist-95iJuo-azFwzD-XdQj-5qVmST-djYmP-dyEiyc-39qre-qwB4Hj-95An56-9CPyZn-aVT1Zv-4rP46V-8sFtGN-8Q2g9U-9GZXEo-95i48r-L1gBh-4JZDh2-78g5eB-6w2M7x-5mN8dL-28gDrt-9BAyac-6yVWRb-95m847-8UsYQM-q6Aqiw-9P8dp4-4rS9kX-aCMDfb-a4bfat-5BhBj8-dMiUtW-rcz8xD-9CQQyR-cpZKaE-cVHwAJ-gxgUTL-9kq4p8-5BjsNE-9CjBEt-8rbjw-n1HZSC-5FX3Vc-fMysK-8TwbkA-97bSjf-6ttEAm-93GhjQ-t58Bjh
https://www.flickr.com/photos/25792994@N04/5299579966/in/photolist-95iJuo-azFwzD-XdQj-5qVmST-djYmP-dyEiyc-39qre-qwB4Hj-95An56-9CPyZn-aVT1Zv-4rP46V-8sFtGN-8Q2g9U-9GZXEo-95i48r-L1gBh-4JZDh2-78g5eB-6w2M7x-5mN8dL-28gDrt-9BAyac-6yVWRb-95m847-8UsYQM-q6Aqiw-9P8dp4-4rS9kX-aCMDfb-a4bfat-5BhBj8-dMiUtW-rcz8xD-9CQQyR-cpZKaE-cVHwAJ-gxgUTL-9kq4p8-5BjsNE-9CjBEt-8rbjw-n1HZSC-5FX3Vc-fMysK-8TwbkA-97bSjf-6ttEAm-93GhjQ-t58Bjh
Photo Credit: butupa (from Flickr)

 

1. 

I am late for my econ class. I have straddled my old red ten-speed and I am pedaling as quickly as I can down 18th, my hunter-green Jansport strapped to my back. I stop at the end of the street, standing high on one pedal. As I wait for the traffic on Summit to clear, I hear a sound over my shoulder: a little whistle, like a bird chirping. When I look over I see a doughy man with a thick handlebar mustache and dark, square sunglasses sitting in the driver’s seat of a green Bronco right next to me; he is leaning back against his seat, waggling his erect penis at me. It is only the second penis I have ever seen, and a ripple of fear moves through me; my limbs turn liquid with adrenaline.

For reasons I will never understand, I roll my eyes and look forward at the street, as if this is just another idiot I have encountered in traffic rather than someone playing with his genitals. I jam the rubber sole of my tennis shoe into the teeth of the bike pedal and shove off into the street. I race to class breathless, panting, filling my lungs with air, my fingers shaking as they clutch the bike handles.

Later, when I am home, I finally think to call the police. The sergeant on the phone is sympathetic but tells me he can’t do anything without a license plate number. I feel stupid, embarrassed by my own lack of agency: why did I not look back to check his license plate? For months—years—I will curse myself for being so stupid as to run away. I look for the chubby man in his boxy Bronco every time I set out, and it will be a long time before I stop expecting to hear the sound of that chirp over my shoulder again.

2.

Later that same spring, I set off on foot toward campus with a plastic container stacked with pancakes I’ve made for my boyfriend. We’ve been together almost a year but he is losing interest, and I want to demonstrate my value by surprising him with a meal he hasn’t requested and probably won’t want. I am standing at the corner of 18th and Summit, and because Summit is clear of traffic, I step off the curb. I have only taken four or five steps when I see a car turning toward me from the opposite side of the street. In a moment that stretches like elastic, I realize the driver has gunned it while still looking over his shoulder for oncoming traffic.

I have nowhere to go when I realize he is going to hit me.

I stand, stranded, in the middle of four lanes, and in that single second when the car and I are facing each other, I pivot and do an about-face in an attempt to avoid being hit head on.

The car rolls over my foot, the tire surprising me with how it feels like a fat, heavy marshmallow, and in that instant the driver jams on his brakes. The traction of the braking tire pins my foot under it and slams me backward onto the ground. As I lie there, I realize I am doing the splits, something I have always been jealous of my cheerleader sister for being able to do. And then, as I blink up at the milk-white sky, I have a very deliberate thought: if I don’t get out of the road, another driver is going to finish what this one started. I stand up and hobble to the side of the road, then place my palm against a maple tree, leaning there to catch my breath.

The driver—clearly a college student also, about my age—puts the car in park at the side of the road and runs out to me, all oh my god oh my god and I’m so sorry and are you okay? All I can think to say—and I realize it is strange as I say it—is that I’m sorry, because I’m pretty sure I’ve ruined his day. My jeans are ripped, my knees exposed and bloody, and the hard plastic sole of my leather shoe is cleanly split, a perfect fracture along the ball of my foot. But I tell him I’m okay—I am not in any immediate pain. The driver insists on writing his name and phone number on the back of a torn cardboard M&M box, the kind used by high school kids for fundraising. I tuck the cardboard into my backpack pocket, and proceed to walk, dazed, to my boyfriend’s to deliver the pancakes. He isn’t there and no one is home at his fraternity house; I feel a twinge of disappointment that I have no one to tell so I walk back home, my jeans flapping open at the knees.

Later that afternoon, I call my mother to tell her what happened, not because I expect her to care—she isn’t that kind of mother and we don’t have that kind of relationship—but because it’s a good story and I still haven’t told anyone. You won’t believe this! I say. I got hit by a car! She startles me with the urgency in her voice: Go to the emergency room right now and get yourself x-rayed. I don’t care if you think you’re not hurt.

My roommate drops me off. A nurse places me on a backboard, where I lie immobilized, my head in a brace, for three hours; I am right next to the automatic doors, which open and close constantly, letting chilly spring air coast over me. The triage nurse has taken my socks off to examine my feet, so my toes are white with cold. My skull has begun to ache from the impact with the street, and my right foot is swollen and throbbing. Tears dribble down the side of my face, more from loneliness than pain. It does not occur to me to sit up and tell someone I’m tired of waiting, to see if anyone cares that I’m here; I’ve been told to lie still so I don’t injure my neck, so lie still is what I do.

After the x-rays show only sprains—no concussion or fractures—I am sent home on crutches. Walking is now painful and I labor with each step. My injuries are all soft-tissue injuries, invisible to everyone but me. I call my boyfriend from a payphone in the lobby to come pick me up, and he is irritated at my request for a ride—I do not have time for this!—and then he gets angry when I burst into tears. He drops me at the curb and doesn’t help me inside, then speeds away.

When I get home, I call the Columbus police; the hospital registration official has told me I need a police report to get the insurance claims paid. A young officer comes to my shabby little apartment, and he perches on the edge of the blue plaid chair next to the door, writing on his clipboard. I hand him the M&M cardboard with the driver’s name and phone number; when he calls the number he gets an answering machine. Seems legit, he says. That’s his name on the message.

When I tell the officer I’m sorry for making him come to my house, for not calling the police when the accident occurred—sorry sorry sorry the refrain of my days—he looks at me and says, Probably better that you didn’t. I cock my head at him, confused. You would have been cited for not crossing at the crosswalk at 17th, he says. Why? I ask. Because you should have used the crosswalk a block away, he says. I feel a bloom of anger in my chest and I knit my brows, letting a little laugh escape. Are you serious? I ask him. You mean I should have walked a block out of my way so I wouldn’t get hit by a car? He stops writing and looks at me. That’s the law, he says.

 And even though I have just been told I am at fault for this accident—the one in which the driver was looking backwards when he hit me, the one in which I could have been killed—I sit a little straighter, indignant. I do not say I’m sorry again.

 


Amy Collini’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Slice, Indiana Review, Baltimore Review, Soundings Review, Pithead Chapel, Rappahannock Review, Ilanot Review and elsewhere.