Ticket Stubs #1: Old soldiers

Glenda Jackson and Michael Caine bow out on a high in The Great Escaper.

Ticket Stubs is a movie column reviewing new and not-so-new releases, Hollywood classics, nostalgic trash, and more obscure cinematic fare.

The Great Escaper

Oliver Parker, 2023

There is a scene in The Great Escaper, which Michael Caine says will be his final movie, in which the old dog’s cheeky charm sinks with the abrupt solemnity of a Tallboy dropped from a Lancaster.

His Royal Navy veteran has just met a former Nazi soldier and they are awkwardly discussing their war service when the German clamps up. Caine places his hand on that of the old enemy and they stare at each other for what is probably ten seconds of screen time but feels like forever. There is a lot going on in that stare: grief, guilt, empathy, anger and futility. It edges on melodrama but the moment feels authentic to Caine’s character.

The Great Escaper is the true story of Bernie Jordan, the 89-year-old World War II vet who, denied a spot on a Royal British Legion trip to Normandy for the 70th anniversary of D-Day, decides to make the journey on his own. Slipping out of his Hove care home, Bernie travels by taxi, train and ferry until he’s across the Channel, where he tags along with a group of fellow servicemen there to pay their respects to fallen comrades. He bonds with Arthur (John Standing), who appears at first to be more together than Bernie but later reveals his own considerable demons, and with Scott (Victor Oshin), a youngster who came home from Helmand missing a leg and now struggles to control the outbursts caused by PTSD.

Back home, the police are looking for the missing Bernie but when they learn of his solo pilgrimage, an officer tweets about it with the hashtag #TheGreatEscaper, a sobriquet taken up by the Daily Mail and thereafter news outlets the world over. But Bernie’s not just in Normandy for the anniversary event; he has a secret mission. In his pocket is an old Player’s Navy Cut tin that belonged to a fallen war buddy; inside the tin, a letter he could never bring himself to deliver to the dead sailor’s sweetheart. Bernie blames himself: he told his mate to get into the tank that a Wehrmacht bomber would make his tomb. Now Bernie wants to find his grave and pay his respects.

Paying respects is a running theme in The Great Escaper but this isn’t one of those gawd-bless-our-heroes numbers. Bernie, so Gerryphobic that he declines to buy Black Forest Gateau chocolate — ‘If you want to flog chocolate bars, don’t start a bloody world war’ — comes to contemn war, its futility and mass carnage. Writer William Ivory (Made in Dagenham) fictionalises parts of Bernie’s story, so who knows if the man himself felt this way, but the movie isn’t making any statements beyond well-worn laments for doomed youth.

What is riveting in the writing has nothing to do with the war or even Bernie’s great escape; it is in how Ivory captures the indignities and solaces of old age. The movie is one of those rare honest depictions of senescence, in which one’s twilight years are not filled with late-life romances and jazzercise as in The Golden Girls, but with more ailments than the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine, a pharmacy of pills, faded memories, semi-clinical sheltered accommodation and dependence on low-paid care staff. This is a warm-hearted and ultimately uplifting movie but it is candid about the approaching end.

Which brings us to Glenda Jackson, who portrays Rene, Bernie’s wife. This was her swan song; she died in June, aged 87. Her performance here is immaculate, so much so that it’s hard to tell where her frail, exhausted self ends and Rene begins. There is no artifice; she lets it all hang loose and natural. Sometimes that’s what acting is: an exuding of personal truth that takes the form of a character. Rene, although she doesn’t join Bernie on his journey, is the moral centre of the movie. It is she who articulates the screenplay’s ideology of ageing, with her tart, northern joie de vivre — life is for living, so get bloody on with it; she who relieves Bernie from seven decades of guilt over his Navy comrade’s death; she who defies the care home’s rules, dances to swing records in her slippers and doles out advice to Adele (Danielle Vitalis), a sweet and droll care worker who gets nowhere near enough scenes. (Twenty-four year old Vitalis has mainly done television but deserves more film roles on the strength of this performance.)

It wouldn’t be fair to say Jackson steals the picture — it’s not her fault she’s Glenda Jackson — but every minute Caine spends in France, the more you want him back home to bounce off her. They come across every bit the husband and wife of seventy years, with all the tendencies and tics you see in old couples. If Caine’s performance is one of good humour and quiet dignity, Jackson brings a schoolgirlish twinkle of devilment to her young-soul-in-an-old-body character.

Bernard Jordan, a marine engineering artificer who served in Operation Overlord, died on December 30, 2014, aged 90, six months after his cross-Channel jaunt. His wife Irene died seven days later, aged 88. The Great Escaper isn’t an especially cinematic picture; there isn’t anything here that couldn’t have been accomplished in a two-part drama for ITV. It is the performances, particularly those of Jackson and Caine, that distinguish the piece from so much pappy WWII nostalgia. They are subtle and affecting and true.

In cinemas now.