Too many fans seem to be blown away

Excellent, a Must See

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

The Great Escape: The Untold Story (2001) *** 1/2 (out of 4)Well-produced story of the actual POW escape that is best remembered today for the classic film THE GREAT ESCAPE. Actual survivors Jimmy James, Alex Cassie, Jack Lyon, Colin Kerby-Green and Les Brodrick recall their days at the camp and their memories on the actual escape. Fans of the film as well as history buffs are really going to enjoy this hour-long documentary for a number of reasons. One of the biggest is simply the fact that the story itself is just amazing and something truly heroic. This documentary also goes into great detail about the events after the men were captured and how fifty of them were put to death by orders from Hitler. It's rather shocking to hear how these murders were carried out and just as heartbreaking hearing from some of their children and wives. The documentary certainly doesn't hold any punches and we even get a few reenactments from the interrogation of the German soldiers who shot the escapees. THE GREAT ESCAPE: THE UNTOLD STORY doesn't go into great details about the event but I think it does do a very good job at giving you the basic events that happened and it's certainly all the more impressive getting to hear the stories from those who were involved.

This is an amazingly good documentary about the actual 'Great Escape'--the one portrayed years later in a major motion picture. The film is narrated by Derek Jacobi and consists of recreations, interviews and various artifacts/archival footage. I was really surprised with the interviews. A couple were with men who had escaped but were captured and returned to prison (this only occurred with a very few men). A few were with surviving children talking about their fathers who were murdered by the Germans after they were recaptured--and these interviews were quite sad and touching. The most telling interview was the man at the very end who wistfully said "...was it all worth it? I don't think so"--mostly because it resulted in the butchering of many good men.Overall, an exceptional documentary--and better than the four-part one also included on the Bonus Disc which accompanies the film "The Great Escape". The only other film I know about this interesting bit of history is an episode of "Nova"--which I will try to locate and review at a later time.

This documentary spends some time talking about what really happened, as it pertains to how things were different in the movie, but I like that it spends more time telling more of the story than the movie was able to, even in its lengthy running time. When the news of the mass escape reaches Hitler, the documentary explains, he flew into a rage and ordered that the men be killed, and it was Himmler, the head of the Gestapo, that chose the number 50 for how many should be shot. Having seen Downfall recently, it's even easier to picture Hitler flying into an uncontrollable rage and ordering people to be shot. MAN that guy was nuts.So the actual escape happened in freezing temperatures in the middle of winter, one of those things that was changed for the film (I have a theory that it was changed because of location concerns, which are explained in one of the other outstanding featurettes on the Great Escape bonus disc, and in an interview one of the escapees expresses amazement that they weren't caught sooner, since it was so cold outside and so hot inside their tunnel that there was a column of steam rising out of it into the night. This same interviewee goes on to give an account of his escape that is heartbreaking, to say the least.The story of the 50 men being shot brings up some major questions about how to carry out justice. As one of the German guards who did some of the shooting explains, "I knew what I was told to do was wrong. I said so, and I was told to get on with it. If I had refused, someone else would have done it. If we had all refused, we would all have been shot." How do you bring justice to a situation like that? When the ultimate fates of the German officers who did the shooting are explained it's hard not to think that they all got what they deserved, but whatever your feeling as to who should have been punished for their crimes, I like that this documentary shows what it may very well have been like for those German soldiers as individuals. It puts a face on the stories of the people on the other side who were following orders and allows you to come to your own conclusion.James Cochran was arrested right on the Swiss border, within sight of freedom. The sister of one of the men who was shot explains that her brother was on the run for seven days and she wants to know what his life was like during that week, but never will. At the end of the documentary, one of the surviving escapees says that he doesn't think the whole thing was worth it, given how it all panned out, and while the escape was a tremendous, heroic effort, I think he was right, but not because of any fault of the men. If they had just sat in the prison, they would have been disobeying orders to consistently try to escape if captured, but it's probably most likely that they would all have lived to see the end of the war and their families again. Sadly, we'll never know.

"The Great Escape: The Untold Story" is about the real great escape, which the Sturges movie is based on. This 60 minute show gives us the real names, interviews with some of the survivors and the story about the tunnel escape.Much of the story is the same as the movie, but you can find some differences. The names are changed and it was actually snowing when the 76 prisoners escaped in 1944. Some of the escapers turned them selves in because they would have freezed to death outside.If you want to know about the real escape, then I can recommend this show. It can be found on the special edition of The Great Escape.