I love this movie, and I've noticed a trend with most movies from this era. NO SEQUEL BAITING. In this and other movies of its time, the action heroes die in the end. There were no franchise films back then. It seems like today that the world will end before Avengers does. Why don't we have movies that kill my favorite people anymore?
shareThis question reminds me of a girl sitting behind me in the theater at the end of Titanic when she wondered why the writers had to make the story so sad. The scene at the end of The Great Escape is probably the only scene of the whole movie that is true to the reality of what really went on. Prisoners acting the way they were depicted in the film, smartasses all, would have been regularly executed.
shareActually very few PoWs were executed by the Germans in their camps- in Colditz for example only one PoW was shot dead while in the act of escaping (Capt Michael Sinclair).
It wasn't customary to execute Allied PoWs- at least not British and American PoWs, the Russians fared somewhat differently.
Some British and Americans did die during the forced marches from the camps in 1945 though.
Trust me. I know what I'm doing.
Funny thing is that the opposite was not true. The allies massacred German prisoners. The western allies killed hundreds of thousands, the soviets, even more.
That's one of the things very few people know. History is written by the winners.
When did we massacre German POWs?
shareIt happened at times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chenogne_massacre
S/Sgt. John W. Fague of B Company, 21st Armored Infantry Battalion (of the 11th Armored Division), in action near Chenogne, describes the killing of German prisoners by American troops:
Some of the boys had some prisoners line up. I knew they were going to shoot them, and I hated this business.... They marched the prisoners back up the hill to murder them with the rest of the prisoners we had secured that morning.... As we were going up the hill out of town, I know some of our boys were lining up German prisoners in the fields on both sides of the road. There must have been 25 or 30 German boys in each group. Machine guns were being set up. These boys were to be machine gunned and murdered. We were committing the same crimes we were now accusing the Japs and Germans of doing.... Going back down the road into town I looked into the fields where the German boys had been shot. Dark lifeless forms lay in the snow.
The mass slaughter of Western Allied POWs was unusual on the Germans' part, and underlines how much the Great Escape annoyed them.
There was a mass escape of Soviet POWs from Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria in early 1945, but again most of them were killed, often by Austrian civilians drafted into search parties to look for them.
"Chicken soup - with a *beep* straw."
Films are made like this today and films with poor endings were made in the 60s except the films of the past have been forgotten like the Avengers will be
share"There were no franchise films back then."
Ever hear of Tarzan? James Bond? Sherlock Holmes? Matt Helm? Maisie? The Road to ____? Torchy Blaine? The Thin Man? Bulldog Drummond? Andy Hardy? Henry Aldrich? Blondie? I could go on and on and on...
YES and YES. . Hollywood has been doubling down on how to re-show the same story since the beginning. Some hit some miss.
I LOVE the Thin Man Series, Myrna is a delight in all of them.
Yes on Myrna.
shareLOL if you get this in time. Tarzan and his Mate is on this morning on TCM. LOL, you don't care probably, yet stated if you do. Maureen O' Sullivan is a delight in it and Johnny might be the best Tarzan, worth a see.
It surprises me people think remakes and sequels are a new invention in Hollywood.
Maureen was probably the best Jane, and Johnny was, in many ways, the best-ever Tarzan. I do wish, however, that the producers of his Tarzan films had decided to make him more articulate, like Tarzan of the novels.
shareRogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) had most of the main characters die by the end of the movie.
shareNo Time To Die?
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