{"id":15717,"date":"2014-07-18T22:14:17","date_gmt":"2014-07-18T12:14:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=15717"},"modified":"2014-07-19T08:23:06","modified_gmt":"2014-07-18T22:23:06","slug":"stalag-17-1953","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=15717","title":{"rendered":"Stalag 17 [1953]"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Director:\u00a0 <\/strong>Billy Wilder
\nWriters: \u00a0<\/strong>Billy Wilder and Edwin Blum
\nCast: \u00a0<\/strong>William Holden, Don Taylor, Otto Preminger<\/p>\n

“Maybe he wanted to steal our wire cutters.\u00a0 You ever think of that?”<\/em><\/p>\n

S<\/span><\/em>talag 17<\/em>, a World War II comedy set in a POW camp, begins and ends with a daring escape.\u00a0 Sandwiched in the middle of it all is a ribald comedy about a group of burly American soldiers doing their best to survive imprisonment at the hands of the Nazis.<\/p>\n

Believe it or not, the inmates of Stalag 17 have it comparatively easy.\u00a0 They report to Oberst Von Sherbach, played by the irrepressible Otto Preminger, a plump and cheery commandant who loves laughter and oddly seems to crave the approval of the POWs.\u00a0 We don’t see much of the other Stalags but you imagine Von Sherbach to be one of the more laid back military officers in movie history.\u00a0 He shares a similar temperament to\u00a0 Captain Renault in Casablanca <\/em>but not the same moral compass.<\/p>\n

The film is narrated by an inmate named Cookie but the core group that we follow in Stalag 17 are Price, Blondie, Animal, Duke and Shapiro.\u00a0 They are the alpha males of Stalag 17 and are constantly hatching schemes big and small, whether its smuggling in a radio for listening to news on the front, sneaking into the ladies delousing cabin to perv on them or planning an escape out of the camp.\u00a0 Invariably, all their plans come unstuck.\u00a0 Von Sherbach finds the radio.\u00a0 He learns when one of the new POWs – Lieutenant Dunbar – confides to the group that he blew up a Nazi ammunition train.\u00a0 The film begins with two POWs trying to escape the camp.\u00a0 The plan is meticulously constructed but the Nazis seem one step ahead and waiting guards shoot the men dead as soon as they set foot outside the camp.<\/p>\n

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The group begin to suspect that there is a mole in Stalag 17.\u00a0 A stoolie who rats out their plans to the Nazis.\u00a0 They suspect Sergeant Sefton.\u00a0 Sefton is the most resourceful man in Stalag 17.\u00a0 He openly trades favours with the Nazis for better food, blankets and other luxuries.\u00a0 He takes money off the other inmates by selling them alcohol from his still, taking bets on mouse races and charging for looks through a telescope pointed at the women’s camp.\u00a0 He confidently predicts that the escapees won’t make it any further than the woods and he is right.\u00a0 The rest of the camp resent him for it.<\/p>\n

Stalag 17<\/em> is a whodunnit set in the POW camp but at its heart, it is a film about how proud American military men deal with confinement and authoritarianism.\u00a0 At various stages of the film they are bored, angry, lusty, scheming and supportive.\u00a0 In such close quarters they sometimes lose their temper with one another.\u00a0 But in their darkest moments, they are also there for one another.\u00a0 One of the saddest inmates of Stalag 17 is Joey, a man so tormented by the sight of his battalion being gunned down that he has become a introverted mute.<\/p>\n

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The body of the film focuses on the indomitable spirit of the Stalag 17 POWs.\u00a0 Mostly this takes the form of their harebrained schemes to ridicule the Nazis and to satiate their needs whether it be for gambling, booze or women.\u00a0 William Holden won a Best Actor Oscar for his role as Sgt Sefton but the scenery chewing twosome that really steal the show are Animal and Shapiro.\u00a0 Their antics improbably turn parts of this film into a screwball comedy.\u00a0 They bicker like a married couple, constantly torment their Nazi captors with pranks and they seem unerringly like a prototype of the characters in M*A*S*H<\/em> and frat house comedies that followed nearly three decades later.\u00a0 For me they were a highlight in this film.\u00a0 Entertainingly daft and never failing to draw a smile.<\/p>\n

As with so many of Billy Wilder’s films, Stalag 17<\/em> is a quality piece of work because it is populated with well rounded and interesting characters who are enjoyable to watch bounce off one another.\u00a0 Wilder has a sure footed confidence with his direction that sees him to weave together a film that has moments of both darkness and levity, often switching between the two in a single scene.<\/p>\n

There are some interesting points of trivia about the film.\u00a0 As I mentioned earlier, Holden won a Best Actor award at the Oscars for his role here.\u00a0 I’m not totally sure why this is.\u00a0 You could argue he isn’t even really the lead actor.\u00a0 I think it was an apology Oscar for not giving him one earlier for his work in Sunset Boulevard<\/em>.\u00a0 Regardless, Holden’s acceptance speech holds the record to this day for its brevity.\u00a0 He simply said ‘thank you’ and left the stage.<\/p>\n

Another curious tidbit about the film is that it was shot chronologically and the cast were supposedly kept in the dark until very late in the film as to the identity of the mole.\u00a0 I don’t know how much of a difference it made to their performances but I will say that I wasn’t able to correctly pick the person out.\u00a0 I like a good whodunnit as much as the next guy and this one was a pearler.<\/p>\n

What else is there to say about Stalag 17<\/em>?\u00a0 It is an entertaining World War II pot boiler that serves up mystery, drama and plenty of laughs.\u00a0 This has it all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

20 years before M*A*S*H there was Stalag 17<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":15719,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1800,5],"tags":[1863,2008,2009],"class_list":["post-15717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classics","category-films","tag-billy-wilder","tag-stalag-17","tag-william-holden"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15717"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15928,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15717\/revisions\/15928"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}