Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [51]
Sturges then hired veteran screenwriter W. R. Burnett, whose previous credits included Raoul Walsh’s 1941 High Sierra and John Huston’s 1950 The Asphalt Jungle, the former a film about an ex-con who can never escape the imprisonment of his soul, the latter a great ensemble piece that set the standard for American heist movies. Both had been adapted from original novels that Burnett had written.
Burnett’s major contribution, at the urging of John Sturges and over Brickhill’s loud objection, was to add American soldiers to the planning and execution of what had been essentially a British-conceived and -executed escape. According to Robert Relyea, who was once again serving as Sturges’s first assistant director: “He thought [adding Americans] would make it a great picture, because it was really about nobility and honor.… I think there’s always a concern to make a picture as accurate as you can, and then you have to have some creative license to adjust to make it entertainment. I think we held to this very close, although, maybe in some cases, characters were altered a bit.” And, of course, it would widen the film’s box-office appeal in America.
The finished script was sent to Steve, who immediately signed on, along with two other alumni from The Magnificent Seven Sturges wanted in the film: Charles Bronson for the role of Danny, “the Tunnel King,” and James Coburn for Louie Sedgwick, “the Manufacturer.” (Sturges had to keep some of the major characters European to keep Brickhill, who had finally approved the script, from having a nervous breakdown, and so both actors used awkward accents to try to help convince audiences they were not “American.”) Also signed was real-life Korean War veteran James Garner as one of the made-up Americans, Bob Hendley, “the Scrounger,” whose job it was to somehow come up with the necessary equipment needed to build the secret escape tunnels. Steve and Garner were, by far, the two biggest American names in the film, the only ones Sturges might be able to count on for any box office clout. To retain at least some of the original British flavor of the novel, Sturges cast British actor Richard Attenborough (after Richard Harris bowed out), for the key role of Roger Bartlett. He filled out the rest of the principals with Brits James Donald, Donald Pleasence, and Scottish-born David McCallum.
Sturges then hired Australian writer James Clavell to polish the script. Clavell’s previous screenplays included Kurt Neumann’s 1958 The Fly and 1959’s Five Gates to Hell, which Clavell also directed. Sturges especially liked Clavell, who later would gain fame as a novelist dealing with romanticized versions of Asian history (Shogun, Tai-Pan), for The Great Escape because he too had actually spent time in a prison camp, albeit a Japanese one, during the war, and Sturges felt that would help him keep the script as accurate as possible.
With cast and screenwriter in place, Sturges set about finding the perfect desert setting to replicate Stalag Luft III. As Sturges’s assistant director, Robert Relyea, later recalled, “Besides the wire and the fences, there was this enormous forest that surrounded the camp that further prevented any prisoners from escaping. I found six very crummy, scrawny pine trees—six—between the barren stretches of Idyllwild and Palm Springs, and I told John I had found ‘the Black Forest.’ He was fighting laughter as we looked at these six trees, but agreed that we could build the camp around them and somehow make it work.”
Before production could begin, however, the Screen Extras Guild refused to allow locals to play extras in the film unless they were brought in from Hollywood, more than a hundred miles from the six trees. Realizing that that would be just as expensive as going to Germany to make the film there, Sturges sent Relyea to Europe to scout locations, and on his advice decided to construct a replica of the original prison camp in Munich, just outside