Stalag 17

Stalag 17 (1953) takes place in a German prisoner of war camp holding Americans. Escape attempts keep failing and the men in the barracks work out that one of them is informing. Suspicion settles on Sefton, who trades with everyone and runs a black market. The source is the 1951 Broadway play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski, which opened in May 1951 and ran 472 performances. Both writers had been prisoners in the real Stalag 17B in Austria. Billy Wilder directed and produced. The camp commandant, Colonel von Scherbach, is played by the director Otto Preminger. Several of the Broadway cast returned, including Robert Strauss and Harvey Lembeck. The shooting method was unusual. The scenes were filmed in chronological order, an expensive and uncommon practice, so that the cast would not know who the informer was. They did not find out until the last three days of filming. William Holden won Best Actor. He was uncomfortable with it, believing Burt Lancaster or Montgomery Clift deserved it for From Here to Eternity, and that he had received it as compensation for missing out on Sunset Boulevard. It was shot in California in February 1952. Paramount delayed the release for over a year, believing audiences had no appetite for prisoner of war stories. The release of Korean War prisoners in 1953 gave it an exploitable angle and only then did it open. It cost 1.66 million dollars and made 10 million. It runs 120 minutes. Good for: prisoner of war films, Billy Wilder's black humour, and tension in confined spaces. Less good for: the comic material in the barracks interrupts the tension, and the running gags between two of the men are wearing now. The German characters are caricatures. The film's view of camp conditions is soft.