STALAG 17

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 751, 4 December 1953, Page 16

STALAG 17

(Paramount) HIS, as young Mr. Dunhill would put it, is a Quick-here-come the krauts push-the-cookstove back shaft-who’ll-stand-in-for-Kromsky-at-appel-tomorrow? type of film. True, it’s a film that Hollywood did dare to make (though the amount of daring required to take over a roaring Broadway success is probably insignificant), but from the manner of its introduction it’s difficult to get one’s mind away from those Toscar-winning travesties tnat the Take It From Here production unit specialises in. "I'm sick of seeing war films about the Army and the Navy and the Marines," says the disembodied voice of the Narrator, as the opening credit-titles fade from the screen, "and none about prisoners of war..." In effect, says the producer-director Billy Wilder, who has apparently not yet encountered The Captive Heart (Ealing, 1946), or The Wooden Horse (London Films, 1950), let’s break new ground, Of course, this particular piece of ground-this blessed plot-had already been extensively fractured, the initial spade-work being done by Messrs. Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski, authors of the stage-play. They drew (to a relatively harmless extent, I feel) on their own experiences as P.O.W.’s in Austria, and Mr. Wilder does not appear to have made more than the conventional adjustments in ‘transferring the work from stage to screen. An occasional exterior shot-mustering prisoners in the dim light of a wintry dawn, for example -exchanges the frowsy atmosphere of the prisoners’ huts for the mud and duckboards of the exercise area, but in general the film accommodates itself cheerfully to the limitations of the stage. This absence of enterprise, of course, would not have been any barrier to enjoyment if the story had quality as comedy, drama or even melodrama. I didn’t enjoy it because it seemed undecided which of the three to be; because the comedy was crude (often too clumsy to be comic in any sense), the drama unconvincingly developed, and the melo-

USS drama of a routine, predictable kind. On top of all that the characters are, with cone exception, almost stereotypes. The Commandant of Stalag 17, Oberst von Scherbach, is the stock caricature of a German officer, heel-clicking, bulletheaded, ruthless and overbearing. The dozen or more American prisoners vith whom’ the story is concerned have almost all been encountered in the same cross-section before-the tough extroverted types, the unfortunates who have /gone round the bend or are half-way round as a result of combat experiences, the. unruffled juveniles who dream of Mom’s apple pie, their more ruffled seniors who dream of wives or sweethearts, and the tough guys who manage to scrounge some comfort wherever they may be. William Holden, who takes the part of Sergeant Sefton (one of the tough guys), was the only member of the cast who captured my attention, but his toughness almost passes belief. He is determined to live as comfortably as he can, and he is not squeamish about the

------ ¥ means to that end. He is the block distiller (schnapps from potato peelings), the proprietor of the weekly rat races, and of a home-made telescope through which the love-starved G.I-s may, at a price, look at female Russian prisoners queueing up at the delousing sheds (they are, I may say, the most attractive Russians I have seen on the post-war American screen). When two Americans attempt a break out of camp, Sefton runs a book on their chances; and when they are shot outside the wire he trades part of his winnings for the luxury of a breakfast egg. There is the hard core of an ugly little drama here, you might feel, but no one around at the time seems to have ‘had the capacity to develop it. Alongside Mr. Holden, the rest is mush and slapstick. I should have mentioned, perhaps, that all but one of the Americans are sergeants. Ex-servicemen brought up to regard sergeants as the lowest form of life will find Stalag 17 ample reinforcement for hard-dying prejudices.