The Great Escape / Великий Побег
Steve McQueen’s bike jump is an iconic movie moment, but is it as authentic as it looks? To find out, we recreated it.
Two feet, four, six . . . 7ft off the ground. After repeated nervous, muddy attempts, Bud Ekins, a motorcycle stunt rider, coaxed the old Triumph into the air, flew over the strands of fake barbed wire and into the history books. The sequence helped make The Great Escape a cinema classic and turn Steve McQueen into an international star. It also made Ekins, who doubled as McQueen, a legend among fellow riders.
In stunt-riding circles, the jump is still regarded as one of the most technically skilled - and controversial - performed for the big screen. Controversial because Ekins later claimed it was done on a standard, factory-built Triumph. Some film historians say such a jump could not have been accomplished except by special effects or on a highly modified machine. Forty-six years after The Great Escape was made, The Sunday Times has solved the mystery by reconstructing the jump.
In the film, Virgil Hilts, the Cooler King, played by McQueen, is fleeing from the Germans and trying to escape to Switzerland. He seizes a military motorbike and a high-speed chase ensues through the rolling fields near the Swiss border. Though McQueen did much of his own stunt riding, the jump was deemed too risky by the film studio’s insurers and McQueen nominated Ekins, a friend who ran a motorcycle repair shop in California, to do it. The scene required propelling the heavy bike high enough to get it over the first of two fences that film crews had built to resemble the border.
For its day, it was a daring feat, no less so for the fact that the barbed wire was actually little strips of rubber tied around normal wire, made by the cast and crew in their free time. Even that concession to safety was not out of concern for Ekins, but because the script required McQueen to become entangled in the wire before surrendering.
After the film was released, Ekins kept quiet about the jump. His silence helped perpetuate the widely held belief at the time that it was McQueen who had cleared the fence and not a stunt double, though McQueen never made this claim. Before his death in 2007, Ekins recounted the experience in a rare interview. “When I was in the air it was dead silent,” he said. “\ was hard. It just went bang, then it bounced. I made it on the first pass. I filmed it. That was that.”
Ekins later admitted numerous practice attempts had failed. “The effects man put a piece of string across at all these different heights,” he recalled. “The first time, I’d take a run at it and jump maybe 2ft off the ground. Then we would take a shovel and dig this natural ramp, changing the angles on it.”
The first stage in our reconstruction was to find a bike that matched the original Triumph Tiger used in the film. The modern Tiger is nothing like its ancestor so we settled on a bike called the Métisse Steve McQueen Desert Racer, a replica of a bike built by McQueen and Ekins in the 1960s. Our replica was built by Gerry Lisi, a British enthusiast, using genuine Triumph parts and home-machined components. Though not identical to the Tiger used in the film, the Desert Racer is comparable in size (albeit somewhat lighter at 297lb versus 365lb) and performance (it uses the same 650cc Triumph engine, giving a top speed of about 90mph). Triumph motorbikes were considered world beaters in their day; in 1965 five of the top 20 finishers of the Daytona 200 were on Triumphs.
But good though it was, by today’s standards the 1960s Triumph was a clunky old machine and quite unsuitable for jumping - all the more reason to marvel at Ekins’s achievement, if it was genuine. We were about to find out.
Next we brought in Steve Colley, three times British trials bike champion and one of the best motorcycle jumpers in the business. Reaching a height of 7ft would normally be a breeze for Colley on a specially built stunt bike. But they typically weigh only 150lb - half that of the Desert Racer - with double the power-to-weight ratio.
Colley was sceptical about whether he could do it (“Ekins and those guys were used to riding heavy motorcycles and making them do incredible things. No one would dare today. It’s a lost art.” Pause. “But I’ll give it a go.”)
As a substitute for Bavaria, the location used for The Great Escape, we chose Carswell golf and country club near Wantage, Oxfordshire, where the rolling fairways matched the landscape of that region. A line of fencing was built with logs to represent the Swiss border.
With everything in place, Colley made his first run. Like Ekins, he could initially manage no more than a couple of feet off the ground. “I’m tugging on these handlebars for all I’m worth and all I’m getting is bunny hops,” he said.
With a longer run-up and using a sand bunker to get lift, he doubled the height. An improvement, but still short of what was needed. In case you’re a golfer, by the way, and have felt guilty about leaving a divot or two, imagine what the scrambler tyres of a 297lb motorbike will do to a groomed fairway.
Colley made some adjustments to the bike, changed the foot rests, strengthened the handlebars and tweaked the engine. By increasing the speed of the run-up and using a wooden ramp built into the bunker, he got close to the height of the fence. After a few more practice runs, he aimed the bike down the fairway and gunned the engine, ready for the final attempt.
Now it’s one thing hurdling string, and quite another jumping a stack of solid tree trunks. Wearing only a McQueen-style T-shirt and fatigue pants, with no padding or body armour, Colley later admitted he was terrified. “I looked at this fence as it rushed towards me and I thought, ‘I’ll either clear it completely or I’ll hit my head on a log, in which case it’ll be curtains’.”
With the cameras rolling (see above), Colley raced towards the fence, flat out in second gear. Up the ramp he roared and into the blue winter sky, appearing to hover like a giant snowflake, before coming down on the other side with a thump.
It was a heart-warming moment. Okay, so it wasn’t a perfect reconstruction. We didn’t, for example, re-enact the bit where McQueen crashes into the second fence and surrenders to the pursuing Germans. But we got as close as we could. As they say in the title credits on The Great Escape: “Although time and place have been compressed, every detail is the way it really happened.”
Dad was happiest on that chase
Chad McQueen was less than two years old when his father started filming The Great Escape, but sometimes it feels like only yesterday, writes Nick Rufford.
“My dad didn’t talk about any of his films much,” says Chad, 48, speaking at his home in Palm Desert, California, “but the way his work was on The Great Escape, with the motorcycles and a great chase scene, I think he was probably never happier.
“He did a lot of his own stunt work. And I think he could have done the Great Escape jump himself. I heard that he tried, but insurance is a funny thing when you’re doing a big movie. They hired Bud to have him take the risks.
“I think the jump was an unbelievable achievement. I mean, if you look at it today you still go, ‘Wow!’ It was just way ahead of its time and it seemed to be a pattern in my dad’s film career. What a great film it is, my kids watch it - it stands up well.
“Look at the star power that was in there: James Coburn, Garner, my dad, Charles Bronson. They don’t make ’em like that any more.
“My dad loved his bikes and I learnt to ride at age six. It was always a full motorcycle weekend around the McQueen household and racing would be on Sunday. I’ve kept some of my dad’s motorcycles. But I think when my dad passed away, he had 138 of them and that’s a lot of flat tyres and dead batteries, and guess who had to take care of them. I’ve kept some Indians, some Triumphs, some Harleys. I’ve got enough to keep me happy for a few years.”
Nick Rufford
From Times Online
ПАМЯТНИК
Прошло почти тридцать лет со дня смерти замечательного актера Стива МакКвина. А его помнят не только кинолюбы, но и мотоциклисты. Представьте, британская компания Metisse Motorcycles выпустит 300 реплик (по 12 999 фунтов стерлингов каждая) любимого мотоцикла Стива - кроссового Metisse Desert Racer с 650-кубовым двигателем Triumph TR6. Актер купил его в 1966 году, чтобы участвовать во внедорожных состязаниях.
Будет справедливо, если мы вкратце напомним славную историю самой компании Metisse Motorcycles. Ее основали в 60-е годы братья Дон и Дерек Рикманы - в равной степени одаренные как мотокроссмены и как инженеры. Их совершенно не устраивали ходовые качества «кроссачей» (или, как их тогда называли, скрэмблеров) той поры - всех этих BSA, Matchless, Triumph ... И они стали делать для них новую ходовую часть с рамами собственного изготовления - и тем самым полностью революционизировали инструкцию внедорожников. А в 70-е годы сотворили такую же революцию и в секторе дорожных машин, когда развернули производство китов для японских 4-цилиндровых стритбайков. И дело заладилось: с рамами Rickman мотоциклы Honda действительно управлялись, а Kawasaki уже не тратили всю свою необузданную мощь лишь на то, чтобы выбросить водителя из седла.
Стив МакКвин гонял свой Metisse в хвост и гриву, начисто игнорируя указания киностудии не ездить на мотоциклах и тем более не гоняться на них в соревнованиях. Актеру приписывают высказывание: «Гонки - это жизнь, все остальное - лишь подготовка к ним». Впрочем, есть некая ирония судьбы в том, что самый знаменитый приписываемый ему кинотрюк - прыжок на мотоцикле через забор из колючей проволоки - на самом деле исполнил не он. В фильме 1963 года «Великий побег» (The Great Escape) его герой, пленный американский летчик, бежит из концлагеря и пытается преодолеть немецко-швейцарскую границу. И хотя во время съемок МакКвин водил мотоцикл, страховая компания категорически запретила ему выполнять трюки. Так что знаменитый прыжок - на серийном мотоцикле безо всяких технических ухищрений - выполнил друг Стива, профессиональный каскадер Бад Экинс.
Через 46 лет после выхода фильма «Великий побег» ведущая британская газета The Sunday Times решила организовать повтор этого трюка. За руль реплики Metisse Desert Racer пригласили трехкратного чемпиона Великобритании по триалу Стива Колли и...Что из этого вышло смотрите сами.
Текст и скан фотографии Metisse Desert Racer
из журнала Мото (май 2009)
You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com