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Summary: Billy Wilder Magic
Review: A hand picked cast delivers for Billy Wilder in showing the events in a pow camp that contains every character imaginable. Harvey Lembeck and Robert Strauss add just the right sardonic humour to the proceedings..along with the all time pro Zig Rumann( Sgt. Schultz) . Wilder did induce his friend Preminger to play the kommandant. Narrated by Gil Stratton Jr.
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Summary: My Second Favorite movie
Review: If you want to see a good video here is your chance. One week I watched this video every night. This is my second video favorite out of about 21 other Videos. So when you have a chance see this movie. Thomas G. Age 11
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Summary: William Holden's finest performance......
Review: Quite easily a front runner for the title of best POW movie ever made, "Stalag 17" is expertly directed by Billy Wilder to provide humour, drama, satire and sadness....and William Holden in his Oscar winning performance as the cynical suspect, Sefton, makes this movie a class act from start to finish !American POW's under the watchful eye of camp commander Von Scherbach (Otto Preminger at his best) are suspicious of a traitor in their ranks...escape plans are going horribly wrong...and the finger of guilt points to the crafty, opportunistic Sefton. William Holden was well deserving of the 1953 Best Actor Oscar as the luckless Sefton...at one time sitting high on the hog with his "racetrack", "moonshine" and "telescope"...but suddenly finding himself the victim of circumstance and his own cynical nature. Holden took on a particularly difficult role as Sefton is definitely not what you would call a likeable character...only looking out for his own welfare, negative of his fellow prisoners escape attempts and eager to pick up an extra dollar any way he can from other prisoners. Sefton is arguably one of the first anti-hero's of the drama genre. Fine support is lent in the film by the hilarious comic talents of Robert Strauss & Harvey Lembeck (Animal & Harry Shapiro)...love that Betty Grable dance sequence...plus the fine character actor, Sig Ruman as the chess playing, German guard, Schulz. A very youthful Peter Graves is "security officer" Price, Gil Stratton narrates the tale as the meek, Cookie...Sefton's sidekick and Richard Erdman & Neville Brand are solid as Hoffy & Duke, the two leaders of the POW barracks. "Stalag 17" is enjoyable on so many levels due to the fine balance of performances between the cast members and the equilibrium between tension and humour that Wilder maintains throughout this memorable movie.... I've noticed some reviewers have called this film a "time passer" or that it is "nothing spectacular"...are they sure we are discussing the same movie ??? "Stalag 17" is top class entertainment and it's release on DVD (albeit without any extra features) is long overdue and well received. A high calibre production that deserves a place in any true film fans movie collection !
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Summary: Caught this once again during the Memorial Day orgy of
Review: World War II flicks. It is special & because of William Holton stands above the rest. I loved Steve McQueen & James Garner in The Great Escape & The Bridge over the River Kwai, also starring Holton, is epic. This movie is on a much smaller scale & is the best of the POW genre. Holton plays the disreputable Sgt. Sefton, a prisoner throughly despised & suspected of being the traitor in the POW camp responsible for escapees being caught & shot. How he singlehandedly reveals the Nazi in their midst is the movie's climax. Shot in glorious black & white adds to its grittiness realistic feel. I get caught up in it every time. It's on cable often, rent it or buy it cheap, here. Classic cinema from the 50's.
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Summary: "Anybody here want to double their bet?"
Review: Billy Wilder's "Stalag 17" is cinematic simplicity at its best. It is a good old fashioned piece of entertainment that effectively establishes a simple and specific situation and then spins an absorbing yarn around it. Throw in several great William Holden moments and you have got yourself a winner of a film.
After a failed escape from the prison camp designated Stalag 17, the imprisoned soldiers start to suspect Sergeant J.J. Sefton (William Holden) of being a snitch. Sefton's reputation as an antisocial cynic certainly has not endeared him to his barrack-mates and they have no qualms over dishing out their own brand of justice on him. Sefton's guilt or innocence is eventually determined shortly before a crucial attempt to smuggle Lieutenant James Dunbar (Don Taylor) out of the prison camp is scheduled to begin.
"Stalag 17" does not have the complex discourse of "Sunset Boulevard" (1950) or the belly-laughs of "Some Like It Hot" (1959) but it is still a notable entry on Billy Wilder's directorial resume. His ability to fuse drama and black comedy results in a prison camp tale that holds up better than all of the best episodes of "Hogan's Heroes" combined. Holden is splendid in his Oscar-winning performance. Watching him here reminds you of just how fine an actor he was and why he is still remembered fondly as one of the legends of the silver screen. The fact that "Stalag 17" is as fresh and absorbing today as it was when it first came out is a testament to both Wilder and Holden and their ability to make truly timeless films.
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Summary: Move over Hogan!!!!!
Review: If you liked Hogan's Heroes ( The series was based on this film ) , then you'll like this more. This movie is more dramatic than comedic. But these were the days when good acting and cool catch phrases were the 'in' thing. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this film, so if you come across a critic that rags it, he's probably the by-product of animal inbreeding.
For the price of the DVD, you have to be crazy not to buy this flick. It's more for the mid 30's to mid 60's audience, but if you ever want to pick up a good looking chick into old war movies, then see this movie, you're guaranteed to get lucky.
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Summary: "What time was it when Pearl Harbor was bombed...?"
Review: This superb WWII drama stars William Holden as Sefton, a cynical self-promoter and POW who trades with his German captors to live well, while his fellow prisoners are suffering and hating him. It seems an informer is at work in the barracks; the commandant knows who is escaping and how, and where the hidden radio is. Sefton is the obvious suspect. After the guys take out their frustrations on him, he sets out to discover the identity of the real traitor - and you'll be surprised who it is!
There are some very funny scenes as well as heart-tugging ones; the harsh realities of life and death in the camp are shown, but the real story is Sefton, the misunderstood outsider, and his struggle to prove himself. William Holden won the Academy Award for his performance. The supporting cast is excellent, as is the script. This is one film you can enjoy over and over. It's entertaining, suspensful, and has a clever twist at the end. A moving salute to the spirit of the American GI.
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Summary: Fall in Love With William Holden
Review: This is one of my all-time favorite war-era films and Holden's best. The movie takes place nearly entirely in the barracks of some American POWs in a German WWII prison camp. Stalag 17 focuses like a laser on human nature in brutal circumstances. It showcases the humanity of these young men through their resourcefulness, humor, and character as well as the damaging psychological effects of wartime internment a world away from home. A masterful film everyone should see.
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Summary: William Holden is the world's most underappreciated actor
Review: I know he won an Oscar for his performance in this role, but has any great Hollywood star been shunted to the background of history as much as William Holden? The list of films in which the man made his character memorable runs the gamut from Sunset Boulevard to Picnic to The Wild Bunch to Network. And while I don't think it's his overall best role, Stalag 17 will be remembered not just as a great film but the one that got Holden his due. As the opening voiceover says (and I'm paraphrasing), there have been a lot of war movies about submarines, flying leathernecks, tank commandos, etc. but none about the P.O.W. camps. Leave it to the late great Billy Wilder to rectify that. Certainly there's no glory of war here, or at least not the kind we're accustomed to. Wilder creates an insular world of desperate and downtrodden men thrown together in confinement and heaps on the stark reality of war's "other side". Holden is the barracks' con man/horse trader and, thanks to the already poor relationship with his fellows, the immediate suspect when they determine someone on the inside is spying on them for the Germans. It's a testament to how well the film has held up over the years that even after seeing it long ago (and thus knowing who the spy is) that I was still riveted in anticipation of how he would be found out. The Germans are a combination of menace and comedy, the former exemplified by Otto Preminger as the camp commander and the latter by the great character actor Sig Rumann as Sgt. Schulz. This film was the inspiration for Hogan's Heroes, but it's best to separate them in your mind if you can and appreciate the complexities of the situations and the characters.
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Summary: A great film that set the pattern for all prison camp movies
Review: STALAG 17 was the film that revitalized Billy Wilder's career. His previous film, the highly underrated ACE IN THE HOLE (easily one of the most cynical movies ever to come out of Hollywood), was a bust at the box office. As a result, Paramount, the studio Wilder had worked for since breaking into the business as a writer in the 1930s, inserted a demand in his contract that he pay for any losses should this film fail at the box office. As it was, it was a smash both critically and financially. Wilder left Paramount in anger after finishing it. This was the first of the great prison camp movies to be made in the U.S., and arguably the best ever made. The story revolves around the attempt to discover which soldier in the camp is a stoolie for the Germans. Suspicion falls upon the profoundly and justifiably hated Sgt. Sefton, played by William Holden in a performance that gained him an Oscar (his acceptance speech was the shortest in the history of the awards: "Thank you"). Gradually all the soldiers turn against him, but in the end he is able to prove who the real fink is. Not an especially great plot, but the setting was completely unique at the time, and Wilder does a great job of building the suspense over who the real informant is. The all-male cast (tough to talk the studio into at the time, since studio heads were convinced you had to have love interests in the film to interest both sexes) is memorable, filled with a bevy of great character performances. A couple of the performers are a bit on the annoying side, especially as they try to strike a note of gaiety despite their confinement, but by and large the cast is rock solid. Especially memorable is famed director Otto Preminger, who despite being both anti-Nazi and a Jew, excelled at portraying Nazi officers in both the 1940s and this film. He steals every scene he is in. The great Sig Ruman, memorable from a host of films from DUCK SOUP to NINOTCHKA, is outstanding as Sgt. Schultz. Gravelly voiced Robert Strauss stands out among the soldiers, and received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Neville Brand was always utterly convincing as a tough guy (in WW II he was in fact one of America's most decorated soldiers, winning only slightly fewer medals than luminaries such as Audie Murphy and Footsie Britt), and he provides some menace in this film when needed. Peter Graves has had a long and unusual career as movie actor, television actor, and TV host, but he was never better than in this. The film, because of when it was made and Wilder's own political convictions, is one of the greater "stealth" political films made in the heyday of McCarthyism. Today it has become commonplace to speak of Hollywood as a bastion of political liberalism, but that was hardly the case in the early 1950s, where not only all studio heads but most directors and actors were riding a wave of reactionary conservativism (the writers were another matter). Wilder and John Huston were two directors who never gave up their leftist political convictions. For the most part, Wilder avoided politics in his movies, but in this one he presents a perfect parable of irrational persecution comparable to that produced by playwright Arthur Miller in THE CRUCIBLE, in which he portrays the McCarthy right-wing hysteria in terms of the Salem witch trials. Likewise, Wilder has Sgt. J. J. Sefton as the object of paranoia, a supposed enemy of the other soldiers, when in fact the real enemy was one of the "good guys," just as Wilder was suggesting that McCarthy was. In context, STALAG 17 has to be viewed as one of the finest political films ever made, though it can be viewed with thorough enjoyment by anyone either unaware or intentionally oblivious of the political structure of the film.
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