Pretty Good Drama Combined with Routine Service Comedy

Rating: 6/10 (8 February 2011)

Shades of Martin and Lewis, Abbott and Costello, and all the other comics who made service comedies in the WWII and postwar years. You'd almost expect Dean and Jerry to show up in Stalag 17. In fact, Robert Strauss, who frequently showed up as the loud but stupid sergeant in some of the service comedies, appears in Stalag 17 as Animal. He was Jerry's bete noire in "Jumping Jacks" and "Sailor Beware."
Strauss's simple-minded humor is kind of fun in those other movies but not what you would expect in a picture by the sophisticated Billy Wilder. You can laugh at the first depiction of Animal's unrequited love for Betty Grable, but not at the tenth. Similarly, the sequence of men dancing with other men to romantic music is funny at first, then gets boring and even a bit disconcerting after the sequence is prolonged and the men give no further evidence that this is at least partly being done in fun. There is much other laying on too thick of humorous material that is usually seen as kid stuff.
In the midst of this, we have a drama, played out by capable actors, including William Holden in a fine performance. Sig Ruman does his "comical German" schtik as in so many other films, and this is a humor very different from the Robert Strauss brand. Even higher on the scale of sophistication is Otto Preminger's riff on the Erich von Stroheim role in Grand Illusion.
Two movies in one, then. Much of the goings on, particularly the humorous parts, seem improbable, yet the movie was based on a play by former POWs. So go figure. It's hard to imagine that being in a German prison camp would give rise to big laughs. Maybe you had to be there.
On the other hand, maybe World War II has been reduced to raw material for the likes of "Hogan's Heroes."