The Great Escape movie corrections

When Bartlett is on the run in the town a car containing Germans pulls up near him. Bartlett stops on the pavement but in the next shot he is standing in the middle of the road. See more...

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The motorcycle used by Steve McQueen is the same motorcycle Henry Winkler used on "Happy Days." See more...

The Great Escape (1963) - 10 corrections

Directed by John Sturges, starring Charles Bronson, David McCallum, Donald Pleasence, James Coburn, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Steve McQueen (add more)

Genres: Action, Adventure, Drama, History, Thriller, War

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. As such, any aggressive/abusive corrections (and I get quite a few) written as if they're comments I've made myself will be ignored. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click the edit icon under an entry, then choose "correct entry". Some entries have "duplicated entry" after them - these are entries which were already listed on the main page, but were submitted again. I occasionally leave these online for a while, just in case they were moved in error, so don't worry about pointing them out to me.

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When Ramsay, Bartlett, Cavendish and Mac are discussing the distances 'Tom' and 'Harry' have been dug, Cavendish is smoking a pipe. Although he has the right end in his mouth, the part with the tobacco in it is facing east instead of north. It stays like this for about 3 seconds before he realises and corrects it. [The fact that the pipe bowl is turned to the side for a couple of seconds is certainly not a 'movie mistake', since this can occur to any pipe smoking individual, such as my late uncle, when not paying attention. Then, as you say, he realized its position and turned the stem to place the bowl upright. It happens.]

Corrected by Rikki Time

The 'Australian' has no Australian accent whatsoever. [So? Coming from another country doesn't automatically mean a deep accent.]

Corrected by Grumpy Scot

Bartlett is waiting for Ashley-Pitt to attend a meeting about getting rid of the dirt from the tunnels. When Pitt arrives, Bartlett says, 'Don't they teach you promptness in the RAF?' Ashley-Pitt was in the Navy. [He actually said "Don't they teach you promptness in the RN", as in Royal Navy.]

Ives never got shot, in fact he was one of the three out of all who escaped to make it back to England. [Duplicated, and already corrected : Nobody called Ives escaped from Stalag Luft III. The three 'home runners' - successful escapees - were Flight Lt Peter Bergsland, Jens Muller (a Norwegian civilian) and Flight Lt Bob van der Stok. The character of 'Ives' most closely resembles Flight Lt H W "Piglet" Lamond in terms of character, but Lamond escaped through the tunnel and was recaptured (and survived). Thus 'Ives' is at best a semi-fictional character and his being shot is not a film mistake.]

Ives never got shot, in fact he was one of the three out of all who escaped to make it back to England. [Nobody called Ives escaped from Stalag Luft III. The three 'home runners' - successful escapees - were Flight Lt Peter Bergsland, Jens Muller (a Norwegian civilian) and Flight Lt Bob van der Stok. The character of 'Ives' most closely resembles Flight Lt H W "Piglet" Lamond in terms of character, but Lamond escaped through the tunnel and was recaptured (and survived). Thus 'Ives' is at best a semi-fictional character and his being shot is not a film mistake.]

Why is Hilts not wearing a uniform? A serving officer captured behind enemy lines in civilian clothing would be shot as a spy. If a prisoner's uniform was too worn or damaged to wear, it was routine for the German authorities to replace it - a P.O.W. in civilian clothes is an obvious escape risk. [The character of Hilts was based (in part) on the life of a British OSS agent who managed to pass as pilot by stealing a flight jacket (revealed in the DVD). We can only assume that since the Germans believed the camp was escape-proof, it didn't matter what Hilts was wearing, since he wouldn't be going anywhere.]

When Hilts tells Bartlett and MacDonald that the tunnel is 20 feet short of the trees, they call for 30 feet of rope to set up the signal system where the men wait in the last chamber for a tug on the rope to come up. The tunnel is 30 feet below the surface, meaning they'd need at least 50 feet of rope, yet the 30-foot length suffices. [The escape chamber is not '30 feet below the surface', but only a few feet down. Men climbing out are only halfway up the ladder when their heads pop out of the exit hole.]

After the Great Escape, Hilts is the ONLY prisoner out of 26 brought back to the camp who is sent to the Cooler. [There were not 26 escapers brought back to the camp. That is the number of escapees that were not shot; 8 were sent to other camps instead of being returned to Sagan and another 3 made it to England. Only 15 of the escapees were returned to Sagan. In the context of the film (as Hilts is not based on a real person) maybe he was sent to the cooler for his antics while on the run (assaulting German troops etc.) and not for the escape itself.]

Corrected by david barlow

After the men escape they are all standing at the train station because the train was late, or there was a hold up of some kind. Was this possibly a ribbing kind of gesture at the term used in Nazi Germany "The government stinks but at least the trains run on time"? [That wasn't about Nazi Germany, it was about Fascist Italy. The phrase "He made the trains run on time" was coined by one of Mussolini's propagandists, and became widely believed, although there was little or no truth to it (source: Montagu, A. and Darling, E. (1967) The Prevalence of Nonsense, Dell/Delta, New York. Page 19).]

While the men are in the truck toward the end of the movie, Big X says that he hopes he hadn't just blotted 70-odd ledgers. How did he know that only about 70 men had gotten out? [Big X and McDonald had been covering the "exit station" of the tunnel until they moved out themselves. So they knew how many men had escaped before them. They also knew that they were the last ones who made it, because they actually witnessed how the exit was discovered just after they had gotten out. Remember they were still hiding in the forest when the first shots rang out.]

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The Great Escape (1963) - 10 corrections

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