Back in 2013 I did a list of 10 Movies I would watch today, tomorrow and next week.

May of these films, thankfully, seem to be in heavy rotation among long-haul airways, so you can see them without commercial interruption if you are crossing an ocean.

However, I left out one movie that has to force its way into the top 10 somewhere (probably at the expense of one of the comedies) — one I watched more than once on the way from Paris to Los Angeles.

The Great Escape.

I meant to mention this a week ago, and then I saw a mugshot of former Manchester United and Everton coach David Moyes, and I decided the coach looks a lot like the late Steve McQueen, which reminded me I had just seen McQueen in The Great Escape — at 37,000 feet.

I love that movie.

I first saw it at the classy (and long gone) Belmont theater — in Belmont Shore, Long Beach, California — within a year of the movie’s 1963 release.

I was a kid at the time, and kids of that era were well aware of World War II because so many of the veterans were still around. You could speak to them. Fifty-plus years later …

The story is based on real events involving escapes by Allied (mostly British) air crewmen taken prisoner during WW2.

And this wiki entry suggests the movie is even more accurate than we might have guessed, given the typically wide space for imagination typically found in movies alleging to be “based on real events”.

It was called “the great escape” because its planners wanted to send out 200 POWs in a single night, which was profoundly audacious.

As it happened, 76 mostly prisoners escaped through a long (110-plus yards) and deep (30 feet below ground) tunnel. The 78th man out of the tunnel was seen by a camp guard, the alarm was sounded and the other would-be escapees remained in camp.

Also accurate were two statistics. (Spoiler alert!)

–Three of the airmen escaped to freedom, as in the movie. Two Norwegians, to neutral Sweden, and a Briton to a UK consulate in Spain, hundreds of miles from the location of the prison, which now is on Polish soil.

–Fifty of those who went out through the tunnel were executed by the Gestapo, apparently to serve as an example to other Allied officers considering an escape.

The film takes liberty by introducing a handful of Americans into the escape, with McQueen’s cocky character “Hilts” (who apparently has no given name) nicknamed “The Cooler King” in the movie because of the many times he was placed in solitary confinement.)

Anyone who has seen the movie will recall Hilts passing time in solitary by bouncing a baseball off the other side of his cell and snagging it in his baseball glove.

(Which inspired me this week to buy a baseball glove, and take a perhaps permanent loan of another, so I can take them back to France and play catch. True story.)

Other prominent characters include Richard Attenborough as Big X, who oversees the spectacularly ornate escape attempt — which included three tunnels, false papers, civilian clothes and train schedules; James Garner as Hendley, “the Scrounger”; Charles Bronson as the claustrophobic “Tunnel King”; and a very young David McCallum who makes the supreme sacrifice so that Big X can stay at large a little longer.

(I have been a McCallum fan ever since, a notion reinforced by his role, a few years later, as the unflappable secret agent Illya Kurakin in the ultra-cool 1960s television series The Man from UNCLE, which ran from 1964 to 1968.

The Great Escape is an excellent drama based on an aspect of World War II not always remembered: The large numbers of POWs held by both sides and how many of them attempted to escape — and a few did, despite long odds.

While watching, the viewer comes to appreciate all the obstacles encountered and overcome, and wonders how much trouble the escapees will be in if they are recaptured. (The film suggests that personnel from the Luftwaffe, which ran the camps for captured airmen, were not cruel jailers and respected the British notion that “it is the duty of every officer to attempt to escape”. But then the Gestapo got involved, and the reprisals were harsh.)

The wiki entry notes that the site of the prison has several monuments and plaques commemorating “The Great Escape”, which has just pushed it high on the list of Otherwise Random Places in Eastern Europe I Want to See ASAP.

And watching it more than once on the plane?

I fell asleep in the darkened cabin, but twice rewound the movie to catch up on bits I had missed … and I twice saw the crucial stuff at the end, including Steve McQueen’s attempt to enter Switzerland via flying motorcycle.

Great movie. I would watch it today, tomorrow or next week … or twice on the same flight.