by James Garner
Shirley, Audrey, and I never knew what he was looking for so we kept searching, trying everything we could think of. We’d have these desperate little conversations: “What does he want?”
“I don’t know, but let’s keep going.”
Looking back, I guess he didn’t know what he wanted, either . . . until he saw it. Or, rather, heard it: Wyler didn’t watch what we were doing; he turned his back and listened. He was hard of hearing, so he’d hook up his hearing aid to the sound system and keep shooting until he heard what he wanted.
And he’d keep changing things. He was actually working from three scripts: In addition to ours, he had the original Lillian Hellman play, which is based on a true story and was done on Broadway in 1934. He also had the first movie version, These Three, with Merle Oberon, Miriam Hopkins, and Joel McCrea, which he’d also directed. It left out the lesbian stuff because of the Hays Code. He’d take a line from here and a line from there and keep moving them around. Then he’d change a line and have you do it again.
Wyler was a brilliant, talented man, and I considered it a privilege to work with him. I simply put myself in his hands. It made me proud whenever I did something that pleased him. He was a great director, and I think it was his judgment and dedication to what he felt was right that made him great.
It was wonderful working with Audrey and Shirley. They were very different, of course. Audrey was quiet and demure, a very proper lady, though she had a great sense of humor. I fell in love with her. (I could never figure out how she could have married that guy Mel Ferrer. She was way too good for him.)
I love Shirley, too. Terrific actress, wicked sense of humor, like one of the guys. One day Shirley and I were kidding around just before a take and Willy Wyler came over and told me, “Don’t do that! Think about the scene.” Shirley could laugh and tell jokes one minute and flip a switch and be in character the next, but Wyler didn’t think I had that ability, and at the time he was right.
The Children’s Hour is a poignant film. In one scene, I cry in front of a mirror. Coming right after years of doing light humor on Maverick, it was a departure. The first time I had to cry on camera was hard, and I didn’t like it. I’ve never gone back and looked at it because I know it would make me wince. But the role propelled me from TV Westerns into major motion pictures.
The Great Escape is based on a true story, the mass breakout of Allied fliers from a German prison camp, Stalag Luft III, during World War II. Almost everything in the movie is accurate, though some incidents are condensed and a few characters are composites. It was such a good story that director John Sturges didn’t have to take liberties. Well, not many. Two of its most exciting sequences never happened.
The screenplay is credited to W. R. Burnett ( Little Caesar, The Asphalt Jungle) and James Clavell ( Shogun), who had himself been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II. There was trouble with the script, so by the time we were done shooting, there’d been four more writers and about a dozen drafts, and we still wound up improvising scenes.
The film is based on a nonfiction book of the same name by Paul Brickhill, who’d been a POW in the real Stalag Luft III after his Spitfire was shot down over Tunisia. As a prisoner, Brickhill had been involved in the tunneling but ultimately couldn’t join the escape because he was claustrophobic.
Sturges bought the rights to Brickhill’s book in 1951, but it took ten years to get the picture made. The studios were afraid of it because there were no female characters, and because they thought it would be too expensive to shoot. Then there’s the unhappy ending, which prompted Sam Goldwyn to complain, “What the hell kind of escape is this? Nobody gets away!” But in 1962, after the success of The Magnificent Seven, Sturges was suddenly bankable, and the Mirisch brothers and United Artists put up $4 million to make the picture.
Allied airmen captured during World War II were sent to prison camps run by the Luftwaffe, the elite flying corps and the least Nazified branch of the German military. For the most part, these camps honored the Geneva Convention and treated prisoners decently. In 1943, the Luftwaffe built Stalag Luft III in Sagan, about one hundred miles south of Berlin, to house prisoners who’d already made escape attempts. In putting the hard cases in one maximum-security camp, the Germans unwittingly created a cadre of super escape artists, men who refused to sit out the rest of the war as POWs. They were determined to create a diversion that would draw German troops away from combat against the Allies, and they knew it would be a propaganda coup if they could break out of what the Luftwaffe boasted was an “escape-proof” camp.
Roger Bartlett, Big X, played by Richard Attenborough, is based on Roger Bushell, a South African pilot who led the actual escape attempt. He wasn’t the ranking officer in the camp, but he was a clever and resourceful leader who knew how to harness the diverse skills of his fellow prisoners. Bushell considered it his duty to “harass, confound, and confuse the enemy.” He’d already tried several escapes when he devised a daring plan to break out 250 prisoners, the greatest escape ever attempted.
As shown in the film, the POWs simultaneously dug three tunnels, code-named “Tom,” “Dick,” and “Harry.” Each tunnel began with a thirty-foot, vertical shaft to make it deep enough so the Germans couldn’t hear the digging with underground microphones. The prisoners built a ventilation system and a trolley to move the dirt out of the tunnel. The soil was sandy and the tunnels were prone to cave-ins, so wooden slats from prisoners’ bunks were used to shore up the walls. There were in fact escape attempts by hiding in a truck loaded with tree cuttings, and by trying to blend in with a detail of Russian prisoners. The inmates actually did sing Christmas carols to drown out the sounds of tunneling, and there really was a Fourth of July celebration with moonshine. (None of us could play fife and drums, so we faked it.)
A Canadian mining engineer named Wally Floody, the real “Tunnel King,” was a technical adviser on the film. A downed Spitfire pilot, he was captured by the Germans and sent to Stalag Luft III, where he was in charge of tunnel construction. Wally made sure the details of the tunnels in the film were accurate down to the color of the dirt.
Even the prison slang in the movie is correct: Goons were the Germans; when interrogated, the POWs told their captors “goon” stood for “German officer or noncom.” The sentry platforms were goon boxes, harassing the guards was goon baiting, the lookouts were stooges, and the guards assigned to escape-detection were ferrets. The prisoners who carried dirt in bags inside their trousers and released it in the yard, right under the goons’ noses, were penguins.
Sturges had wanted to shoot the picture at Idyllwild, in the mountains near Los Angeles. It would have been too expensive to bring hundreds of extras in from Los Angeles every day, so he planned to hire college students from nearby Palm Springs. But the Screen Extras Guild wouldn’t give him a waiver. In need of a new location fast, assistant director Bob Relyea went to Germany and reported back to Sturges that, lo and behold, it looked just like Germany. Even better, the German government was offering all kinds of incentives, so Sturges bit the bullet and flew the whole company across the Atlantic.
We shot the interiors at Bavaria Studios in Geiselgasteig, just outside Munich, and on location in an exact replica of Stalag Luft III built for us on the edge of a pine forest. Because it was an ensemble cast, there were stretches where an actor wouldn’t have a call for days on end, and the cast used the downtime to travel all over Europe. That was fine with Sturges, who liked to issue tourist information to the cast and crew on his movies. He asked only that they check in by phone every night. I decided to stay close and explore Munich, except when Lois flew over toward the middle of it and we spent a few days together in Paris.
For the most part the German people were friendly and hospitable, though there was one columnist who didn’t want us there reminding everybody we’d won the war. He ripped the studio for bringing in a bunch of “television actors.” I guess he meant me and Steve McQueen.
Though I felt
comfortable in Munich and tried to behave myself, I still managed to get in trouble. Believe me, I never intended to take part in the Munich riots. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In that summer of 1962, the student quarter along Leopoldstrasse was a vibrant section of Munich and a top tourist attraction, with sidewalk cafés, restaurants, clubs, and a large public park. The endless stream of people of all shapes and sizes strolling up and down the boulevard reminded me of the Via Veneto in Rome.
One evening a student with a guitar plopped down in the middle of the sidewalk and began playing. Pedestrians had to thread their way around him, and somebody complained. Loudly. The argument attracted other pedestrians, and there was pushing and shoving. Pretty soon, hundreds of people had gathered around, most of them students. The police waded in to break it up, swinging their nightsticks, and that’s when it got out of hand.
More students showed up, outnumbering the police, who in turn called for reinforcements. A line of mounted police advanced. As their riders swung rubber truncheons, the horses stepped on and kicked the students, who fled in all directions, many of them bloodied. It was a police riot, with cops beating and arresting defenseless kids.
The next night was worse. Police arrived in even greater force and there were ambulances standing by. The students were now armed with rocks, and there were more casualties. By the third or fourth night, the story was international news. Spectators came to watch the battle from the sidelines, and tourists got caught in the crossfire, including me.
It was a Friday night. I had just parked my car on a side street when two policemen approached. I thought they’d recognized me and were going to ask for an autograph. Instead, they demanded my passport. It was in the breast pocket of my jacket, along with my wallet, and when I pulled it out, one of the cops snatched the passport and the wallet, which he promptly emptied of its contents, about a thousand bucks’ worth of German marks, and threw the wallet on the ground. When I protested, he laughed in my face. When I asked for my passport back, he told me I could pick it up at police headquarters after they investigated my “case.” I asked him for his badge number, but he just laughed again.
That’s when I lost my temper. A reporter had witnessed the whole thing, and I gave him a spontaneous interview that I would later regret. I told him that the Munich police were out of control, that the situation was worse than what I’d seen in Tokyo while we were shooting Sayonara. I said the Japanese police were tough on student demonstrators, but the Munich cops were much worse. And then I added, “What I’ve witnessed here reminds me what it must have been like under the Nazis in the thirties.”
That little nugget touched a nerve.
The Germans were still sensitive in 1962. They didn’t want to be reminded of the Third Reich, so when I compared the Munich police to Nazis, all hell broke loose. The German public was up in arms and the government demanded an apology.
Despite pressure from the studio, I refused to apologize. I’d hated seeing the kids bullied by the police and I meant what I said. But a few days later, after they’d threatened to deport me, which would have prevented us from finishing the picture, I caved in. I realized it would hurt too many other people. So I issued an apology. But I didn’t mean it.
My character, an American in the RAF named Bob Hendley, was a composite. His part in the actual escape was done by several individuals. It wasn’t a stretch to play Hendley the Scrounger; that’s what I’d done in Korea. Hendley was a hustler who could bribe, barter, or con his way around anything. He’d do whatever necessary to get what he needed, whether an identity card or an expensive camera, and he wasn’t afraid to take a risk when he had to.
Sturges had German actors playing all the Germans, which was unusual for a Hollywood film. It worked: Hannes Messemer was convincing as Kommandant von Luger, as was Robert Graf as Werner the Ferret.
The prisoners were well supplied with cigarettes, coffee, chocolate, and canned goods from Red Cross packages. The Germans didn’t have such luxuries, so it was easy to bribe the ferrets, and Hendley plays Werner like a violin. I think some of the scenes between them were among the best in the film, and Graf was a delight to work with, as were all the German actors. I didn’t feel any animosity from them, even though they were making a film about their side losing the war.
For the most part, it was a happy set and everyone in the diverse cast got along. Donald Pleasence and I became good friends, just like our characters in the film. He plays Flight Lieutenant Colin Blythe, the camp forger who goes blind from working by candlelight. Big X tells him he can’t join the escape, but I promise to take care of him: “Colin’s not a blind man as long as he’s with me, and he’s going with me!”
By the time he made Great Escape, Donald was an accomplished stage and film actor. An officer in the RAF during the war but too old to fly, he was a “boffin”—a desk jockey. One day in 1944, he went on a mission in a Lancaster bomber just to see what it was like. The Lancaster was shot down over France and Donald spent the rest of the war in a fliers’ camp like the one in the picture.
In a sequence that didn’t happen in real life, Donald and I steal a German two-seat trainer with an old-fashioned crank starter to make our escape. In the script, I sit at the controls while Donald cranks the engine, then I have to get out and help him into the plane because he can’t see. The crew could never get the engine to turn over in rehearsals, so Sturges told Donald to go through the motions of cranking it and then he’d do the rest of the scene in cuts. I said, “What if it starts?”
“Don’t worry, it won’t.”
“Okay,” I said, “but if it does we’re in trouble, because I’m not a pilot.”
Just to humor me, Bob Relyea, our production manager and a weekend pilot, gave me a quick lesson on how to use the brakes and throttle. The cameras rolled, Donald turned the crank, and sure enough, the damn thing kicked over on the first try. With the cameras still rolling, I throttled back and tested the brakes. When I realized the plane wasn’t moving, I got out and helped Donald into the cockpit, then got back in myself. I revved the throttle, eased off the brake . . . and the damn thing began to taxi! You should have seen the look on the faces of the crew. But they kept rolling and got the scene. Nobody was more surprised than I was.
In the script, Donald and I run out of gas and crash before we can make it to Switzerland. They couldn’t get a stunt pilot to crash it, so it fell to Relyea. Bob took most of the fuel out of the plane, flew it across a field, and pancaked it, tearing both wings off in the process. Sturges wound up with some great footage and Bob wound up in a back brace.
John Sturges was a man’s man and a good director. He’d started as an editor for David O. Selznick and worked his way up to directing. He really knew how to cut a picture together. His specialty was action-adventure and he had a good track record—he’d done Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Bad Day at Black Rock, and The Magnificent Seven before The Great Escape. He knew how to take a bunch of characters coming from different directions and draw them together in one purpose. In Magnificent Seven, it was protecting a village from bandits. In Great Escape, it was busting out of a German prison camp.
John would assemble a great cast and let them do their thing. He got the most out of actors by bolstering their confidence with a pat on the back at the right time. He was easygoing but could be tough when he needed to be. He was always fair.
In the middle of the shoot, McQueen walked out of the picture. He’d seen about an hour’s worth of dailies and didn’t like how he looked. Wanted to reshoot the whole thing. Of course, they couldn’t reshoot that much footage—it would have taken too long and cost too much money. Steve’s agents flew in from the States and had a showdown with Sturges.
The next day Sturges called me in and said, “Jim, McQueen’s out and you’re the star of the picture. We’ll change a few things here and there. It’ll work.”
I didn’t see how it could possibly work, and neither did Jimmy Coburn, so the two
of us sat down with Steve at my rented house in Munich and asked him what the problem was.
“I don’t like the part. I’m not the hero. And the stuff they have me doing is corny.”
“Well, Steve, the reason you’re not the hero is because it’s an ensemble cast. There are a lot of heroes.”
Steve could be a stubborn little cuss, but Jimmy and I finally convinced him to stay on the picture. To pacify him, Sturges added some motorcycle stunts and changed his character, Hilts, the Cooler King, to a guy who goes out to reconnoiter the surrounding countryside, then unselfishly allows himself to be recaptured so he can share the information with the others.
There were no Americans in the actual escape; they’d all been transferred to other camps before the tunnel was finished. And there never was a motorcycle chase, but I think it’s the most exciting and memorable part of the movie. When people think of The Great Escape, they think of Steve on that motorcycle.
The bike was actually a 1961 Triumph 650 painted green and dressed with Nazi insignia, including swastikas. Steve did most of the driving, including the part of a German soldier chasing him, but not the now famous leap over the barbed wire barricade at the Swiss border. The insurance company wouldn’t allow it, and Sturges didn’t want to risk injury to Steve, so the racer and stunt driver Bud Ekins made the jump—off a wooden ramp just out of frame. Bud estimated that he flew sixty-five feet at a good twelve feet off the ground.
Steve went nuts over there. He was always getting into scrapes. When he wasn’t working, he’d race that motorcycle with the swastikas on it all over Munich just to annoy the Germans. And people would yell. He also totaled a Mercedes Gullwing. Stuck it right into the pine trees. The police finally set up a roadblock and nailed him. They put him in jail for a few hours and took his driver’s license away.