Redecorating THE GREAT ESCAPE

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Redecorating The Great Escape

The Great Escape is perhaps the best laddie film ever made, with strong plot, characterization, and setting, and no kissing. 

But wait until the remake.

The film might be said to divide into two parts; its octet is often quite humorous, but its sestet, which begins with the death of Piglet on the wire, shocks the viewer back into the reality of a WWII prisoner of war camp with its years-long deprivations, humiliations, and deadliness.

The Great Escape is based on Paul Brickhill’s book, a first-person narrative of the real events somewhat fictionalized for the film, especially in the presence at the climax of Americans, who had been transferred earlier, and the irrelevant and annoying motorcycle scenes.  The cold weather is ignored in the sunlit fictional stalag, and the near-starvation of both prisoners and their warders is only hinted at.

Even so, the film, made only twenty years after the events it depicts, approaches greatness.

What if the remake of The Great Escape is engineered by the same folks who make all those flipping house shows?  From the first interview in Oberst von Schmidt und Wesson’s office, the tone would be wholly different:

“Zis is a green camp,” says the Oberst.  “Ve haf incorporated all the latest technology to insure that prisoners do not pollute.  Und no motorcycles unless they are electric!”

In the first meeting of the escape committee, Group Captain Ramsey, Squadron Leader Bartlett, and others discuss the tunnels:

“Really, chaps, naming the tunnels Tom, Dick, and Harry is soooooo lacking in inclusiveness.  Those are all masculine English names.  We need to apply diversity to our tunnels.  I recommend that we rename them Tiffany, Demetrius, and Heather.”

“I’m not so concerned with their names as with their décor.  Tom – or Tiffany – begins under a stove used for heating and cooking, and yet the theme of stoveness is not continued through the tunnel.  A theme must be consistent, otherwise we’re talking about petite bourgeois hodge-podge.  To me, there is a jarring aesthetic disconnect that must be resolved, or the feng shui is simply all wrong.”

“But what do you think of my collection of amusing ceramic owls?  Don’t you think they give the office a certain retro-ironic elegance?”

“I just can’t do a thing with my room.  The holistic integrity is wholly lacking.  Now if I could move into 109 with its splendid view of the cesspool, my creative sparks would fly into new realms of neo-existentialist possibilities.”

“I must caution you that views of the cesspool are commanding six figures these days.  We must be realistic about the exchange rate of our prisoner chits.  This isn’t the Holy Roman Empire, you know.”

“Do you fellows like my escape outfit?  The suiting, by the well-known Grif of Hut 10, is redolent of Bond Street, and that’s fine as far as it goes, but I always say that the accessories pull everything together; indeed, the accessories are everything.”

“Well, if I’m going blind, how is it that I can see that a striped tie with a striped suit is a plebeian faux pas that only a jumped-up Marks & Spencer clerk would commit?”

At this point Oberst Schmidt und Wesson and the ferret Werner enter: “We hear rumors zat you gentlemen are planning to escape our happy little camp.”

“Escape, no; I think we should embrace the possibilities of New Socialist Realism and push the envelope of our minimalist functional wood milieu into brave new spheres of creative beingness, and, like stuff.”

“Ach!  You Englanders!  You may win the war but you will lose the peace.”

“Why is that, Herr Oberst?”

“Because you Englanders make a movie about a prisoner-of-war camp in which the camp commandant is the most likeable fellow!  Ze Russians will never take you seriously after this.”

(Cue closing credits and Elmer Bernstein’s score as freshly arranged by Amanda Bynes and Glenn Beck)

-30-