The Great Escaper (2023)
Directed by Oliver Parker
The Great Escaper by Oliver Parker draws inspiration from the true story of the nearly ninety-year-old Bernard Jordan, who escaped from his care home to reach the French coast for the 70th anniversary of D-Day, in which he had participated. Parker skillfully navigates melodramatic rhetoric, but it is the performances of Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson that naturally evoke deep emotion.
J-Day
Eighty-year-old Bernie Jordan escapes his retirement home with his wife to join other war veterans and commemorate fallen comrades on the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landings. The story quickly goes global, making headlines, but only a part of the tale is told.
The Great Escaper‘s title is noteworthy, as it plays with classic escapism, almost as if the elderly Bernard Jordan were an updated version of the legendary Steve McQueen, and it suggests cinema’s power to escape life’s inherent limitations.
At the film’s world premiere on September 20, 2023, at BFI Southbank in London, Glenda Jackson, who plays Bernard’s wife Irene, had been dead for three months, marking her last appearance on screen just two years after Secret Love by Eva Husson, which was her return to acting after a 30-year hiatus since The King of the Wind by Peter Duffell. Jackson remains eternally present alongside Michael Caine, who, at over ninety, has also retired from acting. They both await the inevitable, yet they are perpetually there, like the characters they portray in The Great Escaper, based on real events.
Jordan’s true story involves his stealthy departure from a nursing home at eighty-nine in June 2014 to reach Normandy for the 70th anniversary of D-Day, an event that saw nearly twenty thousand casualties among Allied and German forces, in which he participated.
Raffaele Meale
Quinlan, July 3, 2024
