Most critics come down in favour. The reviews return to the same things: Sturges’s patient staging of the tunnelling and the escape plan itself, the size and ease of the ensemble, and Steve McQueen, whose cool sits at the centre of nearly every notice. Elmer Bernstein’s score is picked out more often than any other department, and the motorcycle chase in the last half hour is named as the sequence people remember. Several also credit the film with making a real wartime event approachable for audiences who would otherwise never have met it.
The spread is wide. The commonest reservation is that the film softens the grimmer side of the prisoner-of-war experience in favour of adventure, and a few find it old-fashioned even for its time. The New York Times, reviewing on release, calls it artificial and mechanical, its men made up rather than lived. The Evening Standard admires the scale but prefers smaller British escape films such as The Colditz Story.