Michael Caine’s latest film is Britain’s answer to Saving Private Ryan.
The Great Escaper is an engaging exploration of love, loss, memory, and trauma. It is also the final film for its star, Michael Caine, who recently announced his retirement. The film tells the true story of Royal Navy veteran, Bernard Jordan, who “escaped” his care home in June 2014 to attend the 70th anniversary of D-Day commemorations in Normandy.
The film follows Cain’s “Bernie” as he embarks on a deeply personal and emotional reckoning with his war, a journey he undertakes with the support of his stoic wife Irene, beautifully played by the late Glenda Jackson.
The Great Escaper uses a well-known storytelling device: the war-ravaged veteran. Thus, the film is considered the British response to Saving Private Ryan (1998). The film, which pays tribute to the war generation, highlights nostalgia for the 1940s and underscores a resolute British claim to the memory of the Allied invasion.
Troubled homecoming
From the turbulent return of Homer’s Odysseus to the series of Hollywood films made in the 1970s and 1980s that focused on angry, alienated Vietnam veterans such as The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979), the The long-traumatized former soldier. A figure of cultural importance. This has been particularly the case in the British film industry over the past thirty years.
Take, for example, the trilogy of films made in the late 1980s that all dealt with the return of battle-ravaged Falkland Islands veterans to “civilian street”: Resurrected (1989), Tumbledown (1988), and For Queen and Country (1989). Or, more recent productions have focused on returning soldiers, such as Outlaw (2007), The Veteran (2011), and of course Harry Brown (2009).
The latter starred Michael Caine as a Royal Navy veteran who sets out to rid his impoverished inner-city council estate of crime.
Kane’s character “Bernie” is clearly a very different character from Harry Brown (he does nothing more controversial than kick the tires of anti-social bikers). But as a film character, he nonetheless owes something to these cinematic counterparts. Like them, he bears the scars of psychological warfare, scars that wake him in the night and take him back to the shores of invasion on the coast of Normandy.
D-Day on film
The Normandy Invasion has been the subject of several films, perhaps most famously The Longest Day (1962). However, in modern times, the most famous D-Day film is undoubtedly Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), which starred Tom Hanks and Matt Damon.
Aiming to pay homage to the “Greatest Generation,” the film begins with an old soldier (Private Ryan) searching graves in the vast American military cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach in Normandy. This was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting on June 6, 1944.
After finding the grave he seeks, the elderly warrior kneels before the camera zooms in on his eyes so Spielberg can take us back to the battle on that gray spring morning. It’s a powerful scene, and one that clearly inspired The Great Escaper’s director, Oliver Parker.
In fact, Saving Private Ryan has been looming large throughout. Like Spielberg, Parker takes us back to the Normandy cemetery, this time to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the town of Bayeux. He has us wandering between rows of gravestones and, through a series of flashbacks, witnessing the carnage on the coast in faded colours, with salt and sea spray in our eyes.
Pathy
I think these similarities reveal the ultimate point of The Great Escaper. Through the familiar trope of the war-ravaged British veteran, the films pay tribute to those who fought and won in World War II. It’s a generation that has been much vaunted in recent years, especially amid all the Brexit-induced 1940s nostalgia.
In doing so, Kane’s cinematic epilogue also makes a firm British claim on the anniversary of D-Day (complete with the obligatory digs at the “lateness” of the American ally’s conflict). In fact, it is the cinematic counterpart to Britain’s new Normandy War Memorial, which was unveiled just two years ago in June 2021.
Whether or not Parker’s film will continue to have the same cultural impact as Spielberg’s award-winning production remains to be seen. But thanks to the powerful presence of Michael Caine, there’s certainly a good chance.
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