Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve likely seen director John Sturges’ 1963 film, The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen, James Garner and Richard Attenborough. The film ends with fifty of the escapees being murdered in a field by the Gestapo and McQueen’s character being returned to the “cooler,” but there is no hint as to what happened to those responsible for the massacre.
On Sept. 17, the directing team of Paul Wendkos and Jud Taylor’s two-part mini-series, The Great Escape II: The Untold Story, will be making its Blu-ray debut from the Film Chest.
Starring Christopher Reeve as Major John Dodge (one of the survivors), we revisit the “great escape” from Stalag Luft III and the slaughter of fifty of the escapees in part one. The outcome is pretty much the same, but told a little differently.
In the second part, we discover what happened after the war and the efforts on the part of Dodge and others to track down those responsible for the murder of the fifty allied prisoners of war. It is not as clear-cut as you think as both British and the American officials (intel agencies for the most part) actually hindered the search for justice by using the Gestapo creeps for their own purposes (think: Russia and the coming of the Cold War).
Does Major Dodge ferret them out and bring justice to the dead? On Sept. 17 be sure to check out The Great Escape II: The Untold Story on Blu-ray from the Film Chest to discover the answer to that question.
