BIG'S BIG MOVIE LIST

Stalag is a German contraction for Stamm-Lager, roughly meaning "Troop Camp" (according to Google Translate). In truth, Stalags were prison camps for captured Allied soldiers during World War 2, places where (if this film can be believed) soldiers bet on mouse racing, a shot of bootleg potato peel hooch costs two cigarettes, and the guards are basically doughy German pussycats that chortle and jest with their captors. I sat down to this film unaware that it was a WW2 movie. Five minutes in, I felt like I was watching hour 2 of "The Great Escape". Nothing could prepare me for what came next.

"Stalag 17" begins with a botched escape attempt by two American soldiers. The pair are cut down by Kraut machine gun fire immediately following their emergence from the tunnel. Its no question there's a stooly (rat, narc, or snitch) in the camp, but nobody knows who or how they're communicating with the guards. When he openly bets 2 packs of cigarettes that the escapees wont make it, Sergeant J.J. Sefton (Willaim Holden) becomes the object of suspicion among the other prisoners. After all, he seems to have a greater access to goods and privileges than any other prisoner. As the prisoners grow more and more suspicious, Sefton grows more and more intent on clearing his name, and the trail of evidence against him grows greater by the day.

I figured out who the stooly was almost immediately. Call it a lucky guess, but intuition led me to back the right horse within minutes. This took a bit of the frosting off the cake for me when he was finally revealed as the rat, but fortunately it didn't spoil the overall experience for me. Something very unexpected started to happen to me as I progressed through this film: I started laughing. After a few zany scenes (one such scene shows one whole barracks sporting Hitler mustaches (see image at left) and spewing nonsensical German to show the guards they've been successfully indoctrinated) it became clear to me that this movie was a Dramady: enough comedy to keep the overall tone light but still dramatic at the core. Truth be told it made me wish that the film was more of a comedy than a drama, sort of like The Great Escape with The Marx Brothers.

The snitch could've easily been the subplot to a greater story, but in "Stalag 17" it is the only meat you'll find. There's plenty of small characters to give spice to the story, liked the shell-shocked Joey who plays an ocarina fashioned from a potato, or Animal and his unhealthy obsession with Betty Grable, but scrape them together and you get something just shy of greatness. In spite of William Holden's Academy Award winning performance, I felt that he was really a piece of the greater ensemble puzzle, not really breaking out in my eyes.