Stalag 17 ***** (1953, William Holden, Don Taylor, Otto Preminger, Robert Strauss, Harvey Lembeck, Richard Erdman, Peter Graves, Neville Brand, Sig Ruman) – Classic Movie Review 2531

Director Billy Wilder delivers a typically darkly comic adaptation of Donald Bevan’s and Edmund Trzcinski’s Broadway stage play about American airmen’s life in a POW camp in Germany in 1944 towards the end of World War Two in the 1953 wartime comedy drama Stalag 17.

William Holden won an Oscar playing the laconic and cynical Sgt J J Sefton, the camp barracks black marketer who his fellow prisoners, all sergeants, suspect is an informant traitor after two men are shot in an attempt to escape the compound. The plot hinges on who is the real spy working for watchful Oberst von Scherbach (Otto Preminger in an iconic screen role).

Incisive though Holden is as the camp’s scrounger, it is Preminger and Sig Ruman (as Sgt Johann Sebastian Schulz) who triumph and take the acting honours as the Americans’ guards. Robert Strauss (as Sgt Stanislaus ‘Animal’ Kuzawa) and Harvey Lembeck (as Sgt Harry Shapiro) both reprise their amusing performances from the Broadway stage.

Strauss was Oscar nominated as Best Actor in a Supporting Role and Wilder was Oscar nominated as Best Director. It was Holden’s only Oscar, though he was also nominated for Sunset Blvd (1950) and Network (1976). He never won a Bafta or a Golden Globe.

Wilder’s cynical take on war that doesn’t ennoble the participants or often bring out the best in people produces a film that is certainly wittier and probably uncomfortably nearer to the truth than the gung-ho, stiff-upper-lipped British war films of the postwar period.

Also in the cast are Richard Erdman (as Sgt ‘Hoffy’ Hoffman), Peter Graves, Neville Brand, Ross Bagdasarian, Michael Moore, Peter Baldwin (as Sergeant Johnson), Robinson Stone, Robert Shawley, William Pierson, Gill Stratton Jr, Jay Lawrence, Irwin Kaiser, Jerry Singer and Bill Sheehan.

Stalag 17 was a hit on release in 1953, with a cumulative worldwide gross of $10,000,000 on a budget of $1,661,530, and it retains its reputation as one of the finest films about World War Two.

Stalag 17 is directed by Billy Wilder, runs 119 minutes, is made and released by Paramount Pictures, is written by Billy Wilder and Edwin Blum, based on the play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski, is shot in black and white by Ernest Laszlo, is produced by Billy Wilder, is scored by Franz Waxman, and is designed by Hal Pereira and Franz Bachelin.

Preminger told Wilder if he ever forgot his lines, he would present him with a jar of caviar. Wilder said he soon had dozens of such jars.

RIP Peter Baldwin (1931–2017).

RIP Richard Erdman (1925–2019).

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2531

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