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Airdate: The Great Escape

Fans of the 1963 Steve McQueen film The Great Escape will surely want to see this doco on the real thing.

Fans of the 1963 Steve McQueen film The Great Escape will surely want to see the documentary The Great Escape this Sunday arvo on SBS.

BYO motorbike….

Winter, 1944. At the heart of Nazi Germany, 76 pilots – the British, the Canadians, the Norwegian and French, who were held in a prison camp of the Luftwaffe, escaped. The tunnel used for their flight was built in the greatest secrecy, under the nose of the German jailers.

This historical epic, immortalised in 1963 by John Sturges’ movie ‘The Great Escape’ with Steve Mac Queen, went round the world. But the real story of these men overtakes by far the fiction imagined by Hollywood. Among the witnesses of this documentary is Jack Lyon, one of the last survivors of this adventure.

Sunday, 20 May at 5.30pm on SBS.

4 Responses

  1. The film is a very highly fictionalised version of the story-there were no Americans held at the Stalag for example-McQueen, Garner and Coburn were there purely for Hollywood starpower appeal -there have been several documentaries on the actual escape and the aftermath, including the hunt for the perpetrators of the escapee executions post war-these have been shown both on ABC and SBS over the years.
    WTV 44 shows the film here in Perth these days and does it in full Panavision widescreen!

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