The Great Escape

Steve McQueen’s Captain Virgil Hilts gets his most famous ride on a military green Triumph TR6 Trophy, and it suits him perfectly: lean, practical, and a little obstinate. He makes his last break for freedom after slipping out of the camp and seizing the German motorcycle, then tears across the meadowland and rough tracks of Bavaria toward the Swiss border. It is the sort of machine that looks happiest moving fast and staying out of trouble, which is more than can be said for Hilts himself. In this stretch of the film, the bike becomes part tool, part escape route, and part dry joke on authority.