Stalag 17

A few weeks ago, Donald Bevan, one of the authors of the play Stalag 17, passed away. I had to stop and think whether I had ever seen the 1953 movie version, directed by Billy Wilder. I have dim memories of watching at least part of it on TV, but watched the whole thing yesterday on DVD.

Viewed through the lens of hindsight, the film is an interesting if not wholly satisfying entertainment, and not up to Wilder's best. It's set in a German prison camp during World War II, and certainly the 1960s TV series Hogan's Heroes took inspiration from it, even going so far as to have a blustering Nazi character named Schulz, as does the movie. William Holden won an Oscar for his role, though it was thought that it was a make up for his having lost for Sunset Boulevard. Even his wife told him that.

The premise is pretty simple. The Americans in a barracks in Stalag 17 try to mount escapes, but they are always caught. Finally they figure there must be a spy in their midst, and suspicion falls on Holden, who doesn't buddy up with anyone and is constantly wheeling and dealing with the guards. Holden denies he is the spy, and sets about finding out who is. I knew I hadn't seen it when I realized I had no idea who the real turncoat was, which is pretty suspenseful.

Where the film loses momentum is in its attempts at comedy. Wilder mixed comedy and drama often, but here it doesn't work. Most of it comes from the two clowns in the barracks, Harvey Lembeck and Robert Strauss. Lembeck is Harry Shapiro, a Jew, and Strauss is Animal, the hairy and gruff-voiced soldier who is obsessed with Betty Grable. Their clowning is too broad and fell flat with me, especially a long scene in which they try to break into the section of the prison where Russian women are kept. Another scene, in which Strauss drunkenly hallucinates that Lembeck is Grable, made Paramount nervous because of its overt (for the time) homoeroticism.

Strauss was nominated for an Oscar, as was Wilder and the picture, but only Holden won. It's not an obvious Best Actor performance, in that it's an ensemble piece and Holden's character is not warm and cuddly. Holden had begged Wilder to give him a line denouncing Nazis, but Wilder wouldn't let him.

Also in the cast were Peter Graves, later famous for his work in Mission: Impossible (and Airplane!) and Otto Preminger as the Commandant. He had one really funny scene where he put on his shiny boots just to talk with headquarters in Berlin.