After a hiatus, I'm back with my quest to watch more classic movies by selecting a movie for every year since 1940!
It was a little tricky to find something readily available to stream (booo streaming platforms!) but I finally found Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 available completely for free on Youtube.
My classic movie diary so far:
1940: Rebecca
1941: Citizen Kane
1942: There Was A Father
1943: The Ox-Bow Incident
1944: Laura
1945: Brief Encounter
1946: It's A Wonderful Life
1947: Monsieur Verdoux
1948: Rope
1949: The Third Man
1950: Rashomon
1951: Strangers on a Train
1952: Umberto D.
I was really ready to enjoy Stalag 17 before going in. The Apartment and Double Indemnity, also directed by Billy Wilder, are amongst my favourite classic movies. I'm also a sucker for a WW2 escape drama.; I recently watched 1956's A Man Escaped and thought it was brilliant.
Ultimately, however, I didn't end up enjoying Stalag 17 as much as I thought, but it was still an entertaining time. Based on a Broadway play of the same name, the movie follows a group of American POWs in a German prison camp, Stalag 17, who begin to suspect that one of their own is a spy for the Germans.
There are two quite separate elements of the film. The first is the funny, silly, gung-ho comedic portrayal of life in the prison camp. There's a great sense of camaraderie between the Americans, similar to that in The Great Escape, and the creation of a believable, lived-in community that the prisoners have been forced to create together. That includes things like a messenger who delivers camp news, a make-shift 'horse race' where men can place bets on mice, and festive holiday celebrations. There's also a lot of silliness that you sort of just have to roll with - the men dressing up as Hitler to mockingly read Mein Kampf and an oddly friendly German prison guard. It's all strangely jolly, which can make the film feel a little shallow at times, especially when the humour doesn't shine as strongly.
The other half of the movie - my favourite part- is the film noir-esque spy thriller, as paranoia and suspicion brew within their tight quarters. There are a few really effective sequences where the light-hearted hijinks are contrasted with the intriguing evolution of the central mystery - which involves the mysterious spy leaving a recurring signal to communicate with the Germans.
Overall, though, I felt that my biggest struggle was in connecting with any of the characters, which meant that much of the comedy didn't land with me. That is such a shame because Wilder's other movies are chock full of memorable characters; The Apartment, for example, features one of my favourite classic comedic characters of all time in C.C. Baxter, and Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard is so iconic that her final line is quoted to this day ("All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up").
I'd have loved a version of this story that really zeroes in on the tension and paranoia of the herd mentality within the barracks, while still maintaining the sense of warm community between all the American prisoners. There are definitely scenes where this shines through in Stalag 17, but perhaps not as much as I'd have loved it to.
If you want to watch a really fantastic classic WW2 prison-escape drama, I'd really recommend the French film, A Man Escaped, one of my favourite classics for sure.
Thanks for checking out my review of Stalag 17! Before this, the only films from 1953 I'd seen were Roman Holiday and Tokyo Story, the latter of which I found really moving and would highly recommend for fans of slow-paced, thoughtful Japanese dramas. Stay tuned for more from my classics diary soon (...whenever I'm able to find a 1954 movie to stream).
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