This barracks is jinxed!

Rating: Null/10 (21 October 2013)

"The story of that struggle cannot be read without admiration for the courage, the perseverance, the vital force which enabled him to challenge, defy, conciliate and overcome all authorities and resistance which barred his path. I have always said that if Great Britain were defeated in war, I hoped we should find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among the nations." - Winston Churchill
Heavily influenced by Jean Renoir's "La Grande Illusion" (1937), Billy Wilder's "Stalag 17" takes place within a German prisoner of war camp during World War 2's final years. The film was released in 1953 and is regarded as one of Wilder's early masterpieces.
"Stalag's" first half develops a subplot in which J.J Sefton, an American black marketeer, is suspected by his comrades of having spied for their German captors. This subplot has been read as a comment on McCarthyism, but if that were so, its resolution, in which Sefton and his buddies band together to weed out the real rat, misses the historical lesson of McCarthyism entirely.
"Stalag 17" is aided greatly by Ernest Laszlo's grim black-and-white cinematography. Wilder's direction is also expert, though the film too often prettifies life in the camps. This is a feel good POW movie, very Hollywood, and anticipates Wilder's later, lighter, Lubitsch styled comedies (as well as the transvestite humour of "Some Like It Hot"). On the flip side, Wilder teases out a number of very bittersweet and even grim moments, and his Sefton character, infectiously played by William Holden, is always interesting. Pragmatism incarnate, Sefton is a profiteer, a merchant, always taking bets and treating the survival of his comrades as a game of profit, loss, risk and reward. Like Rick in "Casablanca", Sefton then calls himself into action, the film ending with him risking his guts for another human being. Is this an act of altruism, though, or another scheme by Sefton undertaken solely because he likes the odds?
Bizarrely, Wilder portrays Sefton's profiteering as being detrimental within both the collective confines of the barracks, and the larger landscape of war. When Sefton is labelled a traitor by his fellow Americans, his bounty and profits are then appropriated by the group and distributed amongst the men. Ironically, "Allied" involvement in WW2 was designed to stop precisely this kind of collectivism. As the Governor of the Bank of England himself quipped, "British loans to Hitler should be seen as an investment against Bolshevism and communism". Far from an enemy, the monarchs and aristocrats across Europe, of whom Winston Churchill himself belonged (most of the royalty in Germany, England and Russia were related), championed the German Army. Fearful of revolutions, civil wars, and losing their power, they saw Hitler (and even Mussolini, who Churchill routinely praised) as a weapon to be used against Marxists, "Jews", Bolsheviks and Russia itself. A further irony is that, without Stalin's bloody brand of collectivization, Hitler perhaps wouldn't have been defeated; statistically, 79-89% of all Nazi casualties were inflicted by the Soviets.
"Stalag 17" would prove hugely influential, shaping everything form "The Bridge On The River Kwai" to "The Great Escape" to "Papillon" to "King Rat". It would influence the farcical TV show "Hogan's Heroes", and would be one of Wilder's last dramas ("Witness for the Prosecution" and "The Spirit of St Louis" would follow some years later), the director gradually moving toward comedies.
8/10 – Worth two viewings.