One of William Holden's finest roles

Rating: Null/10 (6 August 2011)

William Holden surely never expected that Stalag 17 would be one of the handful of movies he would most be remembered for. He didn't want to do the movie, and was forced to, under contract to the studio. I see that Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas both turned it down. Apparently, they all detested what the character represented.
But a juicy role like this is precisely what a real actor dreams of; it is a chance to prove your chops. Jack Nicholson understood this, and was always looking for out of character roles to extend his range. It is only when an actor delivers a performance out of character that you really know they can act. It convinced his peers, who gave him the Academy Award for best actor.
There is a lot of humor, surely more than in real life, but it seems to get the right balance, and to have set a precedent. Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five, M*A*S*H and, of course, Hogan's Heroes (which was obviously based on Stalag 17) all use humor to make the awful blackness of war bearable. But I think if this were remade today, more realism in the secondary characters would be expected.
spoiler alert:
I like the arc of the story, the cynical POW who has no plans to escape ironically changing his mind and becoming something of a hero. It produces a very satisfying conclusion. But then, it is in character, as there is profit if he succeeds. And given all his scheming and bartering, Holden is more likely to succeed than the others.
Robert Graves takes on the role of the real bad guy, and from his performance, we wouldn't guess who he was, but then he was a lot younger.
If you don't already know Sig Ruman, you haven't seen enough old films. To Be Or Not To Be is another of his great roles. Otto Preminger is another German expat in the movie, and one we saw very rarely as an actor.
The movie begs the question of the viewer, what would you have done in a German POW camp? I have a fair amount of sympathy with the Holden character. Escape seemed improbable, and pointless so near the end of the war. Life was bad, but not nearly as bad as in a Japanese POW camp, where your chances of survival were not good.
The movie avoids stereotyping the Preminger and Ruman characters as evil Germans, though they were not nice people, either. What we see are a lot of different, colorful characters, each with their own strategy for coping with the situation, each honorable from their own perspective, even, I suppose, Grave's German-American spy.
In the end, Holden's character was honorable and redeemed himself. It's strange, in retrospect, that Heston and Douglas didn't understand this.