Do You Want to Escape?
Plotting a way out of the life you hate
I love movies about World War II, especially older movies. As a kid, one of my favorites was The Great Escape. This 1963 classic is almost three hours long and filled with movie stars I recognized from all the reruns of the 60s and 70s TV shows I watched — stars like Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Charles Bronson.
The film is about allied prisoners of war in a German POW camp, and their attempts to escape a camp their captors claimed was escape-proof. One of my favorite lines comes from a British officer, Captain Ramsey.
He tells the German commandant of the camp that:
“…it is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape. If they cannot escape, then it is their sworn duty to cause the enemy to use an inordinate number of troops to guard them, and their sworn duty to harass the enemy to the best of their ability.”
