Nazi Prison Camp Rigmarole

Rating: 6/10 (31 August 2008)

Stalag 17 is easily the strangest movie I've ever seen. It's a whodunnit, a slapstick comedy, a thriller, and a gritty war movie, all rolled into one. Made by people, Billy Wilder among them, who knew full well about the horrors of Nazi camps, and a mere eight years after the end of the war. And this wild concoction managed to snaffle an Oscar and was later ripped off as a TV series. Wow.
While this has some hallmarks of Billy Wilder's genius, it's simply too wild a mixture. I never knew whether to laugh about the prison guards or to be afraid of them, and ended up doing neither. For the same reason the suspense doesn't work. The humour from the comedic trio Animal, Shapiro and Sgt. Schulz ("Do you speaken ze German?" - "Ya!" - "Then droppen Sie dead!") or Marko The Mailman ("Alright, at ease, at ease!") was a bit too low-brow and grinding for my taste, and eventually got onto my nerves.
Watch out for the evil Nazi camp commander played by Otto Preminger, an Austro-Hungarian Jew like Wilder. I'm sure he had a blast in his role.
While it's probably safe to say that no real POW camp was much like the depicted Stalag 17, the movie wasn't that far off the mark in many aspects. For an Anglo-American or French POW, life at such a camp probably was an ambivalent experience. I guess the jovial rapport between the prisoners and guardsman Schulz, for example, wasn't entirely without precedent. But don't make the mistake of mixing up the relatively sheltered situation at camps for Western POWs with the situation of Russian POWs (who were routinely murdered), the situation in concentration camps inside the Reich or even the large extermination camps in Eastern Europe.
Incidentally, I visited the memorial site of a real Stalag the day after I saw the movie. The contrast couldn't have been bigger. While the depicted Stalag 17 was like a summer camp behind barbed wire set in idyllic California, the camp I visited was an enormous, industrialised affair, with many tens of thousands of prisoners from all around the globe. And the nearby camp of foxy female prisoners was sadly lacking.
The title is erroneous, by the way. A POW camp set inside of the German empire would have been numbered with Roman numerals, i. e. "Stalag XVII".
Anyway, the movie. Like I said, it's a mixed bag, and hasn't aged too well. There are better Billy Wilder movies.