THE JUMP and THE FENCE

THE JUMP and THE FENCE....
click on image....
Sturges and McQueen on location in southern Bavaria. Filming took place around the town of Fussen, with the Swiss border more than 100 kilometres away in reality.
	The 'jump' and the 'fence' scenes were located in the hills around Pfronten (more specifically in the Benken area) with the Alps in the background. The heavy Triumph TR6 Trophy Birds were dressed up to look like BMW World War II bikes.

The following series of photographs show the actual field used for the 'jump' and the 'fence' scenes in The Great Escape film. The jump covered a spread of hillside that ran about sixty-five feet from start to finish, with the bike clearing twelve feet in the air at its highest point.



The photographs below is the field to the right of the above field.







	When Steve McQueen crashes into the barbed wire, Oberkirch is the town seen in the background.
Bud Ekins....stuntman
Two feet, four, six . . . 7ft off the ground. After repeated nervous, muddy attempts, Bud Ekins, a motorcycle stunt rider, coaxed the old Triumph into the air, flew over the strands of fake barbed wire and into the history books. The sequence helped make The Great Escape a cinema classic and turn Steve McQueen into an international star. It also made Ekins, who doubled as McQueen, a legend among fellow riders.
	In stunt-riding circles, the jump is still regarded as one of the most technically skilled, and controversial, performed for the big screen. Controversial because Ekins later claimed it was done on a standard, factory-built Triumph. Some film historians say such a jump could not have been accomplished except by special effects or on a highly modified machine.
In the film, Virgil Hilts, the Cooler King, played by McQueen, is fleeing from the Germans and trying to escape to Switzerland. He seizes a military motorbike and a high-speed chase ensues through the rolling fields near the Swiss border. Though McQueen did much of his own stunt riding, the jump was deemed too risky by the film studio’s insurers and McQueen nominated Ekins, a friend who ran a motorcycle repair shop in California, to do it.
	The scene required propelling the heavy bike high enough to get it over the first of two fences that film crews had built to resemble the border.
For its day, it was a daring feat, no less so for the fact that the barbed wire was actually little strips of rubber tied around normal wire, made by the cast and crew in their free time. Even that concession to safety was not out of concern for Ekins, but because the script required McQueen to become entangled in the wire before surrendering.
The Great Escape chase continues (5:10) http://youtu.be/PoEnQH5NXUk
A new house and road to BENKEN cut through here.
After the film was released, Ekins kept quiet about the jump. His silence helped perpetuate the widely held belief at the time that it was McQueen who had cleared the fence and not a stunt double, though McQueen never made this claim. Before his death in 2007, Ekins recounted the experience in a rare interview. “When I was in the air it was dead silent,” he said. “It was hard. It just went bang, then it bounced. I made it on the first pass. I filmed it. That was that.”

	Ekins later admitted numerous practice attempts had failed. “The effects man put a piece of string across at all these different heights,” he recalled. “The first time, I’d take a run at it and jump maybe 2ft off the ground. Then we would take a shovel and dig this natural ramp, changing the angles on it.”

Both Ekins and McQueen appear in the shots leading up to the jump where Hilts races back and forth gauging the terrain, and it's Ekins who lays the motorcycle down into the wire when Hilts is captured.
The 'fence' appears closer to the buildings in the background and may well have been a different location to where the bike was laid down.

Hilts attempts to jump the barbed wire Swiss-German border fence with a stolen Wehrmacht motorcycle, but his petrol tank is hit and he becomes entangled in the wire. The Great Escape scene (6:20) http://youtu.be/PoEnQH5NXUk

This scene starts at the roundabout near Pfronten-Berg Seventy-six men got out that night. Only three made it out of Nazi occupied territory to freedom. By Hitler's orders, fifty were rounded up by the Gestapo and executed..........
In The Great Escape film, the German lorries carrying the escaped prisoners, reach a 'mini' roundabout and each of the lorries peel away in different directions. A religious cross can be seen at the road side. The following photographs are at the 'new' roundabout where the roads lead off to Pfronten- Berg and another road leads off to Weissbech. The road which has the cross on it leads down towards Zell and as you drive down this road the 'hut' scene is on your right immediately next to a tall electricity pylon.........









	As the fifty escape prisoners walk across the darkened hill side, Pfronten-Berg's St.Nikolaus Church can be seen silhouetted in the distance.




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