Oh boy... Top 250 of all time?!

Rating: 5/10 (7 November 2010)

Five stars, all of them for William Holden and the only decent performance in the whole film. It felt like he belonged in a different movie... Like somebody took the serious parts of the Great Escape, and then took the Three Stooges go to Sobibor...and shuffled the pages together.
Slapstick, slapstick, slapstick and then more slapstick. Every second scene is these two idiot goofs impeding the storyline with badly written, badly delivered 'humor.' The acting in this movie is brutal almost across-the-board, even for the era. I've tried to be forgiving given the period during which this was made...but this movie simply does not hold up well.
Jakob the Liar got roasted for its 'excessive' humor but at least most of that humor was semi-realistic and flowed from the characters or situation. Jakob the Liar was not a great movie but Stalag 17 takes the sins of that film and puts them into overdrive.
The humor works in Life is Beautiful because it flows from the situation and has a purpose in the main character's goals during the story. Here it is just forced in between scenes that advance the story. And the characters on both sides are mostly idiots.
When this film was among the Top 250 of all time based on IMDb ratings, my expectations were high. However, now I have to wonder if most of IMDb is high on crack...
Among the pre-1960 classics, this is one of the films that decays the most over time...
Animal and his buddy are like the prototype for Jar Jar Binks or those Ebonics-bots from Transformers 2. Meesa didn't like the goof-off POWs in this film.
This film is sort of worth it if you can suffer through the crap and just focus on Holden's performance and storyline. Maybe somebody should do one of those fan-edits that takes out all the slapstick-scenes. The movie would flow better and be better...