Dreams of Flight
by Dana Polan
The first full-length study of the iconic 1960s film The Great Escape and its place in Hollywood and American history.
Caught on film, the iconic jump of escaped POW Virgil Hilts (Steve McQueen) over an imposing barbed wire fence on a stolen motorcycle has become an unforgettable symbol of a disaffected 1960s America. Dreams of Flight offers the first full-length study of The Great Escape, the classic film based on a true story of American and Allied prisoners of war who hatched an audacious plan to divert and thwart the Wehrmacht and escape into the nearby countryside.
Through breezy prose and pithy analysis, Dana Polan centers The Great Escape within American cultural and intellectual history, drawing a vivid picture of the country in the 1960s. We see a nation grappling with its own military history; a society undergoing significant shifts in its culture and identity; a film industry in transition from Old Hollywood's big-budget runaway studio films to the slow interior cinema of New Hollywood. Dreams of Flight combines history with fan anecdotes and a close study of filmic style to bring readers into the film and its wide-reaching influence. Polan examines the production history, including prior adaptations in radio and television of celebrated author Paul Brickhill's original nonfiction book about the escape, and he compares the cinematic fiction to the real events of the escape in 1944. Dreams of Flight also traces the afterlife of The Great Escape in the many subsequent movies, TV commercials, and cartoons that reference it, whether reverentially or with humor.
Hardcover
English
Brand New
Flap
"Snappy and engaging but also intellectually rigorous. Offers a thoughtful analysis of a well-remembered (but rarely studied) film and uses that analysis to offer deeper insights into American culture in the 1960s."--Patrick Keating, author of The Dynamic Frame: Camera Movement in Classical Hollywood "Polan makes a powerful case for The Great Escape' s prominence within the generic evolution and the larger sweep of motion-picture history, leaving no stones unturned in his exhaustive research and painstaking analysis."--Noah Isenberg, author of Edgar G. Ulmer; A Filmmaker at the Margins
Author Biography
Dana Polan is Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. His previous books include The LEGO Movie and Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Engineering The Great Escape
From Book to Film (and In Between)
2. Tunneling In
The Great Escape: Style, Theme, and Structure
3. Afterlives
Coda
Appendix: "It Really Happened"
Notes
Index
Review
"Dana Polan's rich assessment of the film's making coupled with a superb analysis of the film itself, script, style, themes and directorial bravura is filled with informative nuggets. Eschewing the standard star bio approach, Polan goes much deeper. . . . Written with tremendous authority and great style." * Cinema Retro *
"Dreams of Flight is an act of devotion, a work of extreme connoisseurship." * Air Mail *
"Far more than just a love letter to a foundational film from an author and devoted fan, Dreams of Flight is a rewarding work of scholarly reclamation, a volume that is always precise in its observation of the hidden dimensions of The Great Escape. . . . Through careful attention to formal choices and an impressively broad engagement with memory, history, and cinematic legacies, Dreams of Flight uncovers the many textures of its popular subject." * Velvet Light Trap *
"This book expands in myriad and often surprising directions. . . . Dreams of Flight is remarkable for the extent and imaginative richness of the research materials it brings to bear." * California History *
Review Quote
"Far more than just a love letter to a foundational film from an author and devoted fan, Dreams of Flight is a rewarding work of scholarly reclamation, a volume that is always precise in its observation of the hidden dimensions of The Great Escape . . . . Through careful attention to formal choices and an impressively broad engagement with memory, history, and cinematic legacies, Dreams of Flight uncovers the many textures of its popular subject."
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