The Great Escape II: The Untold Story
(1988) Dir. Paul Wendkos & Jud Taylor
Blu-ray: Film Chest $19.99
A surprisingly successful 2-part NBC-TV miniseries broadcast over successive nights in November, 1988, the first part of which remakes the classic 1963 ensemble film and the conclusion focusing on the post-war attempt to bring the Nazi murderers of the 50 escapees to justice, all based on the true story. For this escape, the names of several of the real-life prisoners are used, and the fiction that some of them were American was dropped (Yanks were kept in a different part of the camp). Christopher Reeve, as all-American (or Kryptonian) as you can get, in fact plays Major Johnnie Dodge, the only only real American escapee, but he was in the RAF, so that’s okay. Anthony Denison is his pal, Judd Hirsch is the former NYC cop helping him with the investigation, and Donald Pleasance – the only holdover from the original cast – is a Gestapo boogeyman. (Well, not the only holdover – producer/director Jud Taylor was in the cast in a minor role.)
We assume you’re familiar with the story from either the great original film or the book: a mass breakout from a Nazi POW camp holding captive flyers. The prisoners of Stalag Luft III are working on three tunnels (nicknamed “Tom, Dick, and Harry”) figuring that if the Germans find one or even two, the other can be completed. In real life, Tom was discovered by the Germans and filled in; Dick was abandoned because a camp expansion made it impossible to complete (it was used as a storage area), and Harry was successfully completed, although only 76 of the planned 200 escapees made it (and 73 were recaptured, of which 50 were murdered by the Nazis).
Reeve’s character after recapture is released into Switzerland, as he was in real life, because he was a cousin by marriage of Winston Churchill’s and he carried a message of hopeful mercy from Germans as the fronts collapsed around them late in the war (it didn’t work). On to part two, perhaps the more interesting part because the first episode strives for realism and thus misses the panache of the classic 1963 version. Reeve, Denison, and Hirsch are commandos hunting down the murderers with little to go on. To be honest, this part takes a while to get going, not least of all because Hirsch is not our idea of a tough NY cop. Once the hunt is on, though, look out: the film because fast-moving, exciting, and shockingly brutal for a 1980s TV movie.
While The Great Escape II: The Untold Story isn’t going to make anybody forget the wonderful original, on its own merits it holds up very well and serves as a welcome reminder that Christopher Reeve was more than tights and a cape, he was a charismatic and talented leading man and sorely missed, even to this day.
The Film Chest 2-disc Blu-ray set is a beautiful encoding of both parts of the original television presentation, which had been shot on film in Yugoslavia. The Great Escape II: The Untold Story looks like a theatrical, not television, presentation.
The Film Chest special features include the trailer, a photo gallery, beautiful full-color booklet with brief cast bios, and other bonus material. For fans of true-life WW2 stories, the original film, Paul Brickhill’s1950 book The Great Escape, or simply of Christopher Reeve, this Blu-ray set is a must-have.
