Steve McQueen on a Motorbike: The Great Escape and Popular Culture

Steve McQueen on a Motorbike: The Great Escape and Popular Culture is Jonathan Vance’s topic. John Sturges' Great Escape, a popular war movie from 1963 is Vance’s pretext to look deeper into how film productions distort, mislead, even fake, historical fact. The movie is based on a compelling true story of 200 men of the Royal Air Force who planned to escape from Stalag Luft III, a German prisoners of war camp. The prisoners were hoping to pass beyond the barbed wire through tunnels, which they began digging in 1943.  The plot was discovered on March 25, 1944. By then, 76 men had gotten away, three of whom eventually made it to England. With a script somewhat fictionalized, the production offered one of the most iconic scenes in any war movie: Steve McQueen’s mad scramble through the Alps on a motorcycle. But as revealed in this talk, it’s also the only scene in the film that has no basis in historical fact. Asking why was it there, Professor Vance is trying to find an answer by looking at events in Nazi Germany during 1943-44, and in Hollywood in the 1960s; the answer will help us understand why reality is never good enough for the movie industry – and how history makes it to the big screen in the form that it does.