The Great Escape: Sedgwick the Cyclist

Following another watching of The Great Escape I can safely say that James Coburn's antics with a bicycle have had a marked effect on how I have turned out.

I can recall as a child (who can't?) watching the film at Christmas and thinking how few of them actually escaped. So much so that I wondered what the 'great' in the title really meant. I now realize that it meant James Coburn escaping by bicycle and on foot through the countryside, over the hills, and through the mountains.... and the 'tunnel kings', Danny & Willy, escaping by row-boat, presumably along the rivers and canals of high Germany towards the Baltic Sea. For me, then, it was the slowness of these escapes that stayed with me, the composure that they maintained, like the bank robber who steps into his getaway car and gently moves away, stopping at the lights, behaving as if nothing is wrong. Who would stop two men in a row-boat, or a man on a bicycle? But these guys in their monkey-suits with their travel documents and stamped faces.... now there's a motley crue if ever I saw one. And then there's poor Steve... the cooler king... who allows a motorbike engine to usurp his own vital movement, and of course gets caught. He is also, outside the world of cinema, one of the first actors to die in real life because of his penchant for racing (he stupidly wore helmets laced with asbestos which caused his cancer and ultimate death at age 50).

So, as a young impressionable boy, watching the antics of Hendley the Scrounger, Blythe the Forger, and Sedgwick the Cyclist (he was actually the 'manufacturer'), I got to thinking about using your own steam to move, about composure and slowness, about that scene near the end where the French guides drop Sedgwick off near the Spanish border and he continues onwards with a new Spanish guide into the pastoral surrounds of freedom through the Pyrenees. 

As I look at myself now, I am Sedgwick, a little shorter to be sure, and with a bicycle that does not shake the bones so much... I am that creature heading into the hills, guided only by my nose and my interest in Being, pedalling slowly and calmly into the pastoral surrounds of freedom....

Always remembering that the flipside of an escape is an entrance....