Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [54]
In the revised script, Hilts also was always trying to escape by himself, a motif established in his very first sequence when he tosses his ball too close to the prison boundary and nearly gets machine-gunned to death by a guard. Later, Hilts breaks out of the compound and steals a uniform, a helmet, and a motorcycle from a German soldier and makes his break. Hilts eludes pursuer after pursuer in the breathtaking chase sequence until he fails to make a jump over a barbed-wire fence and is brought back to the camp once more and put into baseball-and-glove solitary. The sequence ratcheted up the dramatic arc of the film by reducing the cumbersome plot to the essence of what it was supposed to be, an attempt to escape that becomes an exercise in futility and a metaphor for the going-nowhere-while-having-nowhere-to-go POWs.
Audiences were always thrilled by this chase, which was directed by Relyea, and it became one of Steve’s career signatures, but in fact, he didn’t even do much of the riding. Rather, Hilts’s riding was done by Steve’s close friend from the San Fernando Valley, Bud Ekins, a sometime stunt rider and full-time motorcycle builder who, at Steve’s urging, had been hired by Sturges to perform any stunts that the insurance companies would prevent him from doing himself. In the scene Steve plays one of the German pursuers, in effect, movie-magically chasing himself.
Ramps were built for the final, thrilling sixty-foot jump that lands Hilts (Ekins) into barbed wire (stretched and wrapped rubber that the entire company, actors and crew, worked on during their spare time). The sequence was so perfectly put together it earned Ferris Webster an Oscar nomination for Best Editor and Steve a reputation as an extraordinary physical film actor, able to perform unbelievable stunts that were impressive and, equally important, added needed depth to the character he played.
FILMING OF The Great Escape ended in October 1962, and back in America, postproduction took another six months. Sturges hired Elmer Bernstein to do the score, which turned out to be another great one, complete with a whistle-out-the-door, drum-heavy military-style theme that floated throughout the entire film. There were distinct echoes in it of Kenneth Alford’s “Colonel Bogey’s March,” a World War I whistle tune that had driven David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai a decade earlier. (That film was also essentially a true British World War II story populated on-screen with Americans to make it more commercially appealing in the States.)
Despite all the problems with the production, The Great Escape had allowed Steve to finally find his Hollywood star footing, escape the bonds of B-movie hell for good, and take his place alongside Hollywood’s hottest rebel superstars.
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1 There was a film version of Wanted: Dead or Alive that was made in 1987. It was set in the present time and directed by Gary Sherman, with Rutger Hauer playing Josh Randall’s grandson Nick Randall.
2 Koch won Best Screenplay with Julius and Philip Epstein for Michael Curtiz’s 1942 Casablanca. He also wrote the radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, broadcast in 1938, that began an invasion panic across the country. Other noteworthy credits include the screenplay for Max Ophüls’s 1948 Letter from an Unknown Woman.
3 Steve never got used to life in the Russell mansion. About the park, he told one reporter, “Man, what a thing. You let yourself in, relock the gate and sit there looking through the bars. I’d be caged like some kind of a nut off his streetcar going ‘toot, toot,’ and saying, ‘Man, look who is going by on a double-decker bus.’ ”
4 In October 1963, after the film’s release, Steve changed his story slightly when asked about it again by Variety: “My friends and I were trying to make toast on a hot plate. The curtains in the room caught on fire. I ran out in