Breakout

Rating: 8/10 (26 November 2002)

This was the breakout movie that put its star, William Holden, on the map. He was in his mid-thirties when it came out, and had been making pictures for close to fifteen years. His first major role, Golden Boy, made him a promising newcomer back in 1939, and for the next decade he toiled as a medium grade star without showing any potential for growth. Then, director Billy Wilder cast him as the gigolo in Sunset Boulevard, and things began to pick up. It was an edgier Holden now, no longer the Smilin' Jim of his youth. Wilder also directed Stalag 17, and this is the one that put Holden over the top, winning him an Academy Award for Best Actor. He never gave a better performance. You can see why Holden became the top male star of the fifties here. Like all great stars, he works by contrasting different aspects of his personality. His character is a wheeler-dealer in a World War II German POW camp. He'll sell or make book or anything. Nobody likes him. Well, almost nobody. He doesn't horse around with the other guys. Holden's basically polite, seemingly All-American personality is at odds with the character he plays. There's a refinement to him, a vulnerability, that doesn't really fit in with this hard guy part. Yet this works in his favor, and makes him all the more interesting to watch. This is, after all, a movie, not a stage play, and movies work differently. Holden lets us see inside his character, not a lot, but enough to know that he's basically a decent guy. It's almost obvious. To us, that is. Because we're watching a movie. But the other POW's see Holden as he projects himself to them,--as a selfish jerk. This is fine for the character, who wants to be alone anyway. We know that this is basically a defense on Holden's part. The tension between what we know and how Holden presents himself is what makes the movie so marvelous. Holden's not just good in Stalag 17, he's sublime.
As to the rest of the picture, much of it's standard issue service comedy of the Mr. Roberts-Teahouse Of the August Moon kind popular at the time, only it's set in a prison camp. A nice gallows touch. No wonder Wilder was drawn to the play the movie's based on. He handles the straight suspense and intrigue stuff well enough, but overall this isn't his best work. The best scene is near the end, when the soldiers are celebrating and dancing, singing "When Johnny Comes Marching Home", during which a crucial piece of information is revealed. It's a long scene, and at first seems like journeyman work, and when we realize when it's over that Holden heard everything that two characters were talking about, the effect is nearly breathtaking, and the movie, which had been a little fuzzy around the edges up till this time, comes sharply into focus, and stays there till the end.