A Black Comedy War Film

Rating: 10/10 (26 October 2012)

Stalag 17 is a war film which tells the story of a group of American airmen held in a German World War II prisoner of war camp, who come to suspect that one of their number is a traitor. It was adapted from a Broadway play.Produced and directed by Billy Wilder, it features William Holden, Don Taylor, Robert Strauss, Neville Brand, Harvey Lembeck, and Peter Graves. Wilder also cast Otto Preminger in the role of the camp's Commandant.It was adapted by Wilder and Edwin Blum from the Broadway play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski who were both prisoners in Stalag 17B in Austria.
Stalag 17, exclusively populated by American sergeants, is overseen by sadistic commandant Oberst Von Schernbach and the deceptively avuncular sergeant Schultz. The inmates spend their waking hours circumventing the boredom of prison life; at night, they attempt to arrange escapes. When two of the escapees, Johnson and Manfredi, are shot down like dogs by the Nazi guards, Stalag 17's resident wiseguy Sefton callously collects the bets he'd placed concerning the fugitives' success. No doubt about it: there's a security leak in the barracks, and everybody suspects the enterprising Sefton, who manages to obtain all the creature comforts he wants of being a Nazi infiltrator. Things get particularly dicey when Lt. Dunbar, temporarily billeted in Stalag 17 before being transferred to an officer's camp, tells his new bunkmates that he was responsible for the destruction of a German ammunition train. Sure enough, this information is leaked to the Commandant, and Dunbar is subjected to a brutal interrogation. Certain by now that Sefton is the "mole", the other inmates beat him to a pulp. But Sefton soon learns who the real spy is, and reveals that information on the night of Dunbar's planned escape.
The movie survives the jump from stage to screen with flying colors, thanks to Billy Wilder's typically sterling direction and a darkly funny script.The good greatly outweighs the bad, particularly in the profile of Holden's character, a pragmatic, self-centered cynic whose heroism, when it is finally called upon, appears to come from deep within the barriers he has placed inside of himself.Despite the seriousness of the situation,it is as much comedy as wartime melodrama, with most of the laughs provided by Robert Straussand Harvey Lembeck. Other standouts in the all-male cast include Richard Erdman, Neville Brand, Peter Graves, Gil Stratton and Robinson Stone.It is a bleak, black comedy in which the laughter can die in the throat.