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Billy Wilder finds surprisingly frothy humor in the darkest of settings in Stalag 17, a World War II film that moves freely between comedy and drama. The eponymous prisoner-of-war camp somewhere on the Danube houses 600 captured American airmen, and the film paints a slice-of-life portrait of their day-to-day lives, focusing on jaded wheeler-dealer William Holden, who is suspected by his fellow prisoners of spying for the Nazi wardens. Holden won an Oscar for his hard-boiled yet multifaceted performance as the wily sergeant who makes a fortune in cigarettes (the prisoners' main currency), runs a distillery, and stages mouse races for his fellow inmates. But it’s the film’s array of colorful characters that really make it come alive. Notable here is famed director Otto Preminger as the camp's commandant -- a turn that recalls Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion, a clear precursor to Stalag 17, in which director Erich von Stroheim starred as a WWI POW camp commandant. Many viewers will also recognize Stalag 17 as the template for the beloved '60s TV series Hogan's Heroes. Although the film does darken toward the end, as a mysterious spy is unmasked, Stalag 17 is a POW camp, not a concentration camp. Eschewing heart- and gut-wrenching moments, Wilder moves deftly through territory where the Geneva Convention still holds, with just enough heroism and patriotism to make Stalag 17 a WWII genre classic. Gregory Baird
All Movie Guide
The scene is a German POW camp, sometime during the mid-1940s. Stalag 17, exclusively populated by American sergeants, is overseen by sadistic commandant Oberst Von Schernbach (Otto Preminger) and the deceptively avuncular sergeant Schultz (Sig Ruman). The inmates spend their waking hours circumventing the boredom of prison life; at night, they attempt to arrange escapes. When two of the escapees, Johnson and Manfredi, are shot down like dogs by the Nazi guards, Stalag 17's resident wiseguy Sefton (William Holden) callously collects the bets he'd placed concerning the fugitives' success. No doubt about it: there's a security leak in the barracks, and everybody suspects the enterprising Sefton -- who manages to obtain all the creature comforts he wants -- of being a Nazi infiltrator. Things get particularly dicey when Lt. Dunbar (Don Taylor), temporarily billetted in Stalag 17 before being transferred to an officer's camp, tells his new bunkmates that he was responsible for the destruction of a German ammunition train. Sure enough, this information is leaked to the Commandant, and Dunbar is subjected to a brutal interrogation. Certain by now that Sefton is the "mole," the other inmates beat him to a pulp. But Sefton soon learns who the real spy is, and reveals that information on the night of Dunbar's planned escape. Despite the seriousness of the situation, Stalag 17 is as much comedy as wartime melodrama, with most of the laughs provided by Robert Strauss as the Betty Grable-obsessed "Animal" and Harvey Lembeck as Stosh's best buddy Harry. Other standouts in the all-male cast include Richard Erdman as prisoner spokesman Hoffy, Neville Brand as the scruffy Duke, Peter Graves as blonde-haired, blue-eyed "all American boy" Price, Gil Stratton as Sefton's sidekick Cookie (who also narrates the film) and Robinson Stone as the catatonic, shell-shocked Joey. Writer/producer/director Billy Wilder and coscenarist Edmund Blum remained faithful to the plot and mood the Donald Bevan/Edmund Trzcinski stage play Stalag 17, while changing virtually every line of dialogue-all to the better, as it turned out (Trzcinski, who like Bevan based the play on his own experiences as a POW, appears in the film as the ingenuous prisoner who "really believes" his wife's story about the baby abandoned on her doorstep). William Holden won an Academy Award for his hard-bitten portrayal of Sefton, which despite a hokey "I'm really a swell guy after all" gesture near the end of the film still retains its bite today. Hal Erickson
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