The Great Escape

This is one of the first movies my father showed me, when I was about 12 years old. That was over 30 years ago. To this day it is one of my favorite movies of all time. It is also the first movie I remember that made the specific point that not all German soldiers were Nazis. And there was quite some animosity between the military branches like the German Air Force towards the SS and Gestapo. There is this neat little scene in the office of the camp leading officer and it's awesome to see how he really doesn't even care about the Hitler salute. As a teenager that was an important distinction and it is sad that to this day a lot of people still don't know that a lot of German soldiers actually hated the Nazis and only kept on fighting for patriotism. The German officer even says he just hopes he can survive the war together with the prisoners as comfortably as possible. This was made in 1963. To this day not many WWII care to make a distinction between SS and other German military. For me this is the greatest triumph of this movie.

Very engaging, but at the same time could have easily be close to an hour shorter than it was. I hadn't seen this in almost 20 years and revisited for the remastered Criterion release.