Stalag 17

Wilder consistently infused his films with wit and intelligence, offering comedy in his dramas and drama in his comedies. And Stalag 17 is a shining example. [28 Mar 2006, p.E1]

Unlike previous POW films, Wilder and co-writer Edwin Blum's script, based on the play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski, presents the prisoners not as paragons of patriotic virtue but as real, self-interested, bored soldiers trying to survive. Holden is magnificent as the heel-turned-hero, but Stalag 17 is full of wonderful, well-directed performances.

One of the greatest mixes ever of gritty war drama and roll-on-the-floor hilarity. [29 Mar 2002, p.2A]

Interesting depiction with a pretty decent performance from Holden and supported by a credible cast.

Wilder takes the Broadway play, as well as the genteel camaraderie familiar from the British POW films, shakes it all up, makes it tougher, funnier, cruder and subtler.

The legit hit about GI internees in a Nazi prison camp during the Second World War is screened as a lusty comedy-melodrama, loaded with bold, masculine humor and as much of the original’s uninhibited earthiness as good taste and the Production Code permit.

The problem is that the two moods aren't properly cross-fertilised, with the resolute bleakness of the settings and Wilder's direction positing a reality that is constantly undercut by the comic opera crew of Germans headed by Preminger. A fascinating film, nevertheless.