The Great Escape - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of The Great Escape or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to The Great Escape

[jessica]

There is a superstition that whenever a prisoner attempting escape is told "good luck" by a fellow prisoner, the escape will fail. Ironically, these are the same words that the German officer uses to capture Bartlett and MacDonald near the end of the movie.

[ray]

With the deaths of James Garner (Robert Hendley) on July 19, 2014 and Sir Richard Attenborough (Roger Bartlett) on August 24, 2014, David McCallum (Eric Ashley-Pitt), William Russell, and John Leyton are the last surviving stars of this movie.

[lonnie]

The motorcycle ridden by Virgil Hilts, that was used for the fence jump, was a 1962 Thunderbird Triumph, which was refurbished to look like a bike twenty years older.

[aaron]

Steve McQueen held up production because he demanded that the script be re-written to give his character more to do.

[frederick]

Of the real twenty-three recaptured P.O.W.s who were spared execution, seventeen were returned to the camp, four sent to Sachsenhausen concerntration camp, and two to Colditz castle.

[sandra]

Director John Sturges' assistant Robert E. Relyea was an amateur pilot and offered to fly the plane for the sequence in which Hendley and Blythe commandeer a plane for their escape. In one segment, he had to simulate the plane losing power and descending over a line of trees. According to Relyea, a farmer in his field saw the plane with its Nazi insignia coming in low over his head and threw his rake at it. Another time, Relyea was arrested when he had to put the plane down in a field that happened to belong to a German aviation official. He also piloted the plane in the crash shot, knocking himself unconscious and being taken to the hospital where he woke up later feeling a sharp pain down his back.

[morris]

During idle periods while this movie was in production, all cast and crew members, from Steve McQueen and James Garner to production assistants, and obscure food service workers, were asked to take thin, five-inch strings of black rubber and knot them around other thin strings of black rubber of enormous length. The finished results of all of this knotting were the coils and fences of barbed wire seen throughout the movie.

[russell]

There are six different languages spoken or sung in the movie: English, German, French, Russian, and one word in Spanish, as well as two words of Latin "Lanius Nubicus" when Flight Lieutenant Blythe is describing the masked shrike or butcher bird in the forgery scene. There is also a song in a light Scots dialect where Ives and MacDonald are singing "Wha Hae the 42nd" in the fourth of July scene just before "Tom" is discovered.

[marc]

This movie features no main female characters.

[gabriel]

According to David McCallum, the barbed wire, into which Hilts (Steve McQueen) crashes, near the end of the movie, which was made of rubber, was made by the cast and crew during their free time by tying small pieces of rubber around larger ones.

[lonnie]

MacDonald (Intelligence) was based on George Harsh, a very good friend of Wally Floody (the real Tunnel King). They were transferred to Belaria before the escape. Harsh was a very interesting character who was from the American south, and had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force as a tail-gunner. In the 1920s Harsh had committed murder and was sentenced to life. A medical student, Harsh performed an appendectomy on a dying prisoner and saved his life. The Governor of Georgia granted him a pardon and he was set free. After the war, he had personal problems as he was plagued by guilt over the crime he committed as a youth. On top of adjusting to life after fifteen years in captivity (twelve years on the Georgia chain gang, followed by three years as a P.O.W.). On Christmas Eve 1974, he shot himself, but survived. A stroke soon left him partially paralyzed. When that happened, Wally Floody and his wife brought him up to their Toronto house and looked after him. He eventually went to live, at his own urging, at the Veteran's Wing at the Sunnybrook Medical Centre. He died in January 1980.

[bryan]

Although there are three tunnels being dug, Tom, Dick, and Harry, only two of the secret entrances are ever shown: the one under the barracks stove, and the one in the showers.

[ray]

Steve McQueen accepted the role of Hilts on the condition that he got to show off his motorcycle skills. The motorcycle scenes were not based on real-life.

[christina]

Goof, not a point of trivia. The ball glove Hilts used is not from the early forties since the fingers are sewn together. It probably did not show up until the early fifties.

[lena]

The coaches of the train have the logo of the "Deutsche Bundesbahn", the national railway of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the Third Reich they should have had the logo of the "Deutsche Reichsbahn".

[ray]

The real camp can be visited today in Sagan, Poland. It's a ruin now, that's mostly used for archaeological purpose. A replica of the camp is located forty kilometers (twenty-five miles) south, where you can enter a model of tunnel "Harry" yourself. In the movie, they confused the actual names of the tunnels.

[addison]

The barracks interiors were constructed on soundstages at the German studio.

[jessie]

The shooting of the recaptured escapees was one of the charges at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial of Hermann Göring and other Nazi leaders.

[claude]

Sir Richard Attenborough said many years later working with Steve McQueen on this movie was one of the toughest challenges he had ever faced, and their on-set relationship was not peaceful. McQueen was not combative, but he wouldn't hesitate to let anyone know if things were not as he would wish them to be, or believed that they ought to be.