Inside man

Rating: 5/10 (22 July 2015)

Stalag 17 is directed by the legendary Billy Wilder. It is an adaptation of a stage play and was filmed just seven years after the end of the Second World War.
Its an uneasy mixture of drama, suspense and broad comedy. Given how some British movies made in the 1960s were so pompous about the war its refreshing to see an anarchic take of the war few years after the end of hostilities.
Stalag 17 is a Prisoner of War camp inside Germany with captured American personnel. The film opens with two men trying to escape who are soon captured and killed. The prisoners think that one of them is a rat and suspicion falls on Sefton (William Holden) the resident black marketeer and hence not the most popular person in the hut. Sefton's character is similar to George Segal's character in King Rat, a man who knows how to live on his wits and his mission is to survive, preferably in some comfort.
Some of the comedy did not work for me, I found it irritating. It focuses on Animal who is infatuated with Betty Grable and wants to break into the nearby compound which holds Russian female POWs and his friend Shapiro. The film would had been better if they were the two characters trying to escape at the beginning of the film and shot.
Yet there are some serious aspects to the film. The men are held in filthy conditions given new blankets for a few hours when the man from Geneva arrives to inspect the camp for human man rights breaches and are then quickly taken away. They receive letters from back home and find out that they are behind on their rental payments or their spouses might be cheating on them.
However it looks not all of the men are American. One of them is a German inside man, placed there to find out all manner of information that could be important to the Germans. Sergeant Schultz who regularly comes into the hut and takes part in the buffoonery with the prisoners is also exchanging messages with the insider. This plot only unfolds as Sefton realises he needs to clear his name quickly and sets about to unravel the rat.
I did feel that bit of the plot was not very strong. No one in that hut played chess, yet the chessboard was always out and no one seems to have noticed the knotted/unknotted cord. Also with Sefton now the prime suspect, we see the real insider asking one of the new men for information on a sabotage event that took place. Its clear that the men would eventually realise that Sefton was not the rat, especially if they managed to get Sefton out of the way like kill him.
I class Stalag 17 as a curious war film which was sold as a comedy. It is neither a comedy nor a straight drama. It inspired the television series Hogan's Heroes and William Holden won a best actor Oscar for his role.