An enjoyable POW movie

Rating: 8/10 (1 June 2010)

"Stalag 17" is one of the first POW movies and, while it pleasantly breaks from the war movie tradition at the time, it seems to have set the tone for many good and bad war movies that followed. I'd say that movies from "The Great Escape" to even "M*A*S*H" followed in the footsteps of Stalag 17, which dared to say that a war movie could be more than just a melodramatic, pseudo-patriotic formula film.
The story of a bunch of POW sergeants trying to deal with prison camp life despite having a spy in their ranks, "Stalag 17" is mostly comedy with some light drama, an unexpected format for a war film. The comedy is not particularly high-brow or intellectual, mostly it's based on Sergeant "Animal" and his straight man doing their vaudeville routines, but it works. It's still pretty funny even in 2010.
The actual plot of the movie, the imprisoned Americans trying to ferret out a spy in their ranks, isn't delivered with nearly the gusto or energy we'd see in later POW movies, especially "The Great Escape". Still, this must have been quite the ground-breaking movie in 1953, and I'm glad it was made. It's still fun to watch, even if I wouldn't rate it as an all-time classic, even of the war movie genre.