Quotes

Group Capt. Ramsey: Colonel Von Luger, it is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape. If they can't, it is their sworn duty to cause the enemy to use an inordinate number of troops to guard them and their sworn duty to harass the enemy to the best of their ability.

Col. Von Luger: Yes I know. The men under your authority have been most successful. This man, Ahsley-Pitt for example. Caught in the North Sea, escaped, recaptured, escaped, recaptured. Archibald "Archie" Ives: 11 escape attempts. He even tried to jump out of the truck coming here. Dickes, William: known to have paticipated in the digging of 11 escape tunnels. Flight Lieutenant Willinski: four escape attempts. MacDonald: nine, Hendley, the American: five, Haynes: four, Sedgewick: seven. The list is almost endless. One man here has made 17 attempted escapes. Group Captain, this is close to insanity.

Group Capt. Ramsey: Quite.

Col. Von Luger: And it must stop!

See more...

Trivia

While Steve McQueen performed most of his own stunts, the only stunt he didn't perform was the 60 foot jump over the Austrian-Swiss border fence. The jump was performed by stuntman Bud Ekins, who later doubled for McQueen in "Bullitt." See more...

Movie Mistakes blog

Update alerts | Exclude type?

Mistakes

Trivia

Pictures

Quotes

Easter Eggs

Corrections

Questions

Submit

Mistake Visible crew/equipment: The first time Hilts (Steve McQueen) is locked up, you can clearly see the edge of the wall, and to the left a stage hand moving.

Mistake Continuity: Check out the memorable scene when Hendley and Blythe, trying to reach Switzerland in a stolen training aircraft, fly over marvellous Castle Neuschwanstein. According to Hendley, they've almost made it, just 20 minutes of flight and one mountain range left to cross. This is quite funny because the Neuschwanstein shot reveals that they're actually flying straight in the wrong direction. The camera faces south, the plane moves from right to left, meaning they're heading east, straight away from the Swiss border which is just 50 kilometers west of the famous castle.

Mistake Visible crew/equipment: In the scene where everyone is lining up to receive the moonshine that the Americans made you can see a crew member on the left hand side. He is wearing a red baseball cap and modern clothes. He is motioning for the extras to go into the main shot to get the alcohol. (Widescreen edition).

Mistake Continuity: When Roger is in the van talking to Macdonald, his face is deliberately dirty and stubbled - but when they are about to shoot him, he is clean-shaven. similarly with his bruises which seem to magically disappear by the evening of the first day.

Mistake Continuity: In the end of the movie, Hilts (Steve McQueen) is returned to the camp - he is dirty and his shirt is torn. When he enters the cooler, after being tossed his baseball glove, he is clean and his shirt is no longer torn.

Mistake Continuity: In the scene where Steve McQueen is pulling wire across the road, and attaching the end to the pole to trip up the motorcycle rider you can clearly see two shadows on the ground of Steve in opposite directions due to the camera lights.

Mistake Continuity: When Blythe starts to lose his eye sight, he tests his eyes by closely examining the forged document. But the document he holds up is different from the document we see in the later shots.

Mistake Continuity: In the scene in which the POWs are distributing the tunnel dirt over the compound, Hendley is leading a group of POWs in a soldier's march. In one shot, dirt is coming out from the bags inside their trousers, but their hands are visibly swinging back and forth; they can't be pulling the strings in their pockets to release the dirt.

Mistake Continuity: When Hendley and Blythe emergency-land their plane, it dashes into a copse. Both wings are cut off by trees and stay behind, while the fuselage runs on for several meters, finally coming to a halt with the tail facing down and the cockpit up. Next shot (pilots exiting the plane), the crash site looks very different: The tail now points into the air, cockpit down. And even worse, the wings have returned to the plane, I mean they are still cut off, but now positioned neatly on both sides of the fuselage instead of all those meters behind where you'd expect them.

Mistake Continuity: When Hilts and Ives are put back in the cooler after their first escape attempt, the dirt on their faces in the corridor outside their cells doesn't show up in the same places when they are actually in their cells.

Mistake Continuity: When Bartlett is on the run in the town a car containing Germans pulls up near him. Bartlett stops on the pavement but in the next shot he is standing in the middle of the road.

Mistake Continuity: Towards the end of the film, when Hilts (Steve McQueen) is in a motorcycle chase with the German guards, if you watch closely, when the camera cuts away from Hilts and to the German motorcyclists, you might be able to notice that one of the guards chasing McQueen IS actually McQueen! They used him to play one (or maybe more) of the guards because of the experience he had with motorcycles. This can also be seen in some behind the scenes footage on the DVD version of the film.

Mistake Continuity: When Hilts draws his gun to shoot at the motorbikes, he steadies his gun-holding hand with his other hand, but in the next shot, he is holding his hand in a different way.

Mistake Continuity: Just after Ashley-Pitt has worked out how to hide the dirt, we see Ramsay raking the dirt and Bartlett and MacDonald walk out from behind a building and look at him, but in the next shot, Bartlett and MacDonald are looking at each other.

Mistake Continuity: When the Australian POW is stealing a bicycle, he wire cuts a padlock. As he gets on the bike in the next shot, the padlock has completely vanished.

Mistake Other: In the scene where Hilts and Ives are taken down to the cooler for the very first time just after arriving at the camp, watch the wall as the door is closed by the guard behind Ives - it very obviously moves as the door slams shut.

Mistake Continuity: After Ramsay, Bartlett and MacDonald drink the American moonshine, Ramsay's collar and neck change between shots.

Mistake Revealing: When McQueen steals the motorbike from the German soldiers and rides off it is clearly a Triumph, a British make, not a BMW or Zundapp which was what the German army used. More to the point it looks like a 1960s model.

Mistake Continuity: After Hilts is dismissed from the cooler for the second time, he tells Bartlett about his escape plan, to which Bartlett replies, "Is Ives going with you?" After he says this, his hands change position in relation to his mug.

Mistake Other: When James Coburn and Charles Bronson are pretending to be Russian prisoners and attempting to walk out of the camp, if you look in the open windows of the huts in the background (past the men leaning out the windows), in several of the huts you can see that there is nothing inside, with wooden beams/braces visible to hold up the walls.

1 2Next page

You may also like: The Dark Knight | The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor | Twilight | Titanic | The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

Submit this page to:

reddit Facebook What are these?

Easily printable version of this page