Bill Ash escaping activities. He ended the war as a flight lieutenant. In August 2015, the BBC reported: "When Ash died aged 96 last year his obituaries noted that he was said to have been the model for Virgil Hilts, the lean, leather-jacketed airman played by Steve McQueen in the 1963 film "The Great Escape"". The character Hilts, nicknamed "The Cooler King" because of the time he spends in the prison camp's punishment block (which the prisoners call the "cooler") for his persistent escape attempts, steals a motorbike and tries to escape to Switzerland but is caught while using it to jump
The Escape (1914 film) finally released it on June 1, 1914, response to "The Escape" was of a mixed character and the film was dumped on the States' Rights market by the end of the year. Lillian Gish recalled "The Escape" as one of the finest films Griffith ever made, whereas Griffith himself regarded its failure as a momentary distraction during the planning stages of "The Birth of a Nation". Iris Barry first reported "The Escape" as a lost film in 1940 and despite an international search for Griffith's film output lasting the decades since, "The Escape" remains one among a small handful of