There seems to be something almost indecent about American plans to remake The Colditz Story, with Tom Cruise and Matt Damon starring as the escaping heroes. It is not merely that the British invented the genre of the escape movie, but that its dramatic conventions are so Britishly mythic. All the tales are in essence based on British public school lore, their essential text being Tom Brown's Schooldays, but with the Boys' Own Paper, Riddle of the Sands and the homophilic chummery of Watson and Holmes providing subsidiary inspiration.
The essence is a celebration of British masculinity, untroubled and uncontaminated by the soft and milky rabble that is womankind. (Rather good that; one of your own? Tennyson, actually.) Perhaps it's not entirely coincidental that so much of what is seen as being so classically British is in fact Britishness viewed from the margins. The quintessentially English Protestant duo of Baker Street were the invention of a Scots Catholic who was proud of his Irish roots. The author of Riddle of the Sands was to die an Irish patriot before Irish guns. Thomas Hughes, the inventor of Tom Brown, was, paradoxically enough, a zealous socialist who paupered himself founding a socialist commune in Pennsyvania.
Rugby days
And the most important laureate of all of the escape genre was Paddy Reid, of Irish family, and educated at Clongowes. One has to ask: was his enthusiasm for escape, and for celebrating the legend and lore of escapology, merely an adult reliving of his schooldays, as Hughes lived and lived his days at Rugby?
But for this sort of thing to succeed, you not merely need a credulous public - and that is what the British faithfully provided throughout the 1950s, as Ealing, Shepperton and Pinewood vied to produce yet more filmic essays about wizard chaps whose upper lips were so stiff you could dig an escape tunnel with them.
You would have to be naive indeed to believe in the truthfulness of these period pieces; as you would have to be to believe in the greater truths that lie behind cinematic portrayals of the American Frontier. Their importance lies not in what they represent in themselves but in what they represent to their audiences: a binding quality, a common subscription to the same historic falsehoods.
In the case of the British escape genre (as opposed to the tiny French escape genre, which as a genre could not survive the unsurpassed, unsurpassable genius of La Grande Illusion) there was no sex at all, even though its primary participants were of course very young parties in pants. Homosexuality must have been rife amongst these 19- and 20-yearolds with nothing to do for year after year but to make illicit rendezvous with one another behind the escape committee's hut; but it is one of the conventions of the genre that the sexual urge be banished the moment a chap entered Stalag Luft Shirter (as indeed was female sexuality rigorously quelled in BBC's distaff answer to Colditz, Tenko, in which with flamboyant chastity hands stayed well above the waistline at all times).
The Alamo
So how can the Americans make a film within such a genre? Is that not rather like the British remaking the St Valentine's Day Massacre along the lines of The Railway Children or recreating the most seminal event in Texan history as Carry on up the Alamo, starring Sid James as Davy Crockett and Hattie Jacques as Tonto? Yes, and why shouldn't Tonto have been present at the filmic Alamo? Is it not as much a part of Hollywood cinema culture as the superior labial rigidity is British that anachronism and inaccuracy are invariably key ingredients? (Enter Queen Victoria: "But are you sure, Dr Wallis, that your bouncing bomb will be ready to suppress the Indian Mutiny in time?")
Maybe the point is not to make the film within the genre, but to capture the genre itself. It is one of the curious features of empires that they not merely want commercial domination, but seek artistic and mythic victories too. Rome took Green legend and Latinised it in detail. Spenser's Faerie Queen did duty both as a poem and as an artistic weapon of colonial conquest. Laureates of the Raj attempted to requisition Indian culture in the name of the Queen-Emperor, and the odd thing is, that in certain aspects, both literary and culinary, their bastard hybrids were re-absorbed and refined by the Indians.
Code-breakers
But at the moment the traffic in Hollywood all seems to be one-way. The D-Day Landings are British- and Canadian-free; soon so will Colditz. Apparently, the code-breakers at Bletchley Park are next. When will Hollywood turn its transmutational eyes on Ireland and, maybe, Synge? When will Riders to the Sea be set in Omaha, with Pegeen Mike (wrong play, I know, I know, but that's the American way) played by Madonna, and Harrison Ford starring as Patrick Pearse?
You doubt it? Listen, if the Yanks can Americanise the Colditz culture, nothing on this broad green earth is safe. Ah. Here comes Woody Allen as James Connolly. But be reassured: remember; as India has shown, the reverse process of cultural imperialism has its own dynamic too. So, Irish cinema , Paddywood, can reply in kind. See, George Custer (played by Ardal O'Hanlon) at Little Big Horn; meanwhile nearby, unbeknownst to him, vast numbers of Indians are gathering, led by their fierce but celibate warrior-chieftain, Mahatma Gandhi.
