The Great Escape
I don’t know if this will lose me any “cred,” not that I should worry about that with all the imposter syndrome I have anyway, but I have a little theory about three-hour-long movies I’d like to share with you. Simply put, if your movie is going to be in the ballpark of three hours or more, you’d best have a good reason for it, and it’d best not feel like a three-hour movie. “Anatomy of a Murder” is the one I always point to as my example, it feels like it’s an hour and a half, not nearly three. It’s been a good stretch of years since I last saw director John Sturges’s wonderful 1963 film “The Great Escape.” When the wonderful new blu-ray edition by The Criterion Collection showed up at my doorstep, I was quite surprised looking over the back of the case to see the film was almost exactly three hours long. My memory of watching the movie was not of a three-hour movie, maybe one that was two at the most. As I watched “The Great Escape” yesterday afternoon, I was reminded