Movie Review - Stalag 17

ts a strange movie, half comedy and half prisoner of war thriller. Set in 1944 in Stalag 17 (located somewhere on the Danube) the film is partially narrated by Cookie who gives us various pieces of useful information about the prison, the Germans, the war and the various prisoners.

From the opening shot you see its a damn huge camp with Cookie telling us there are 40,000 American, Russian, Polish and Czech prisoners in total all living in different compounds. Cookies compound holds 640 American airmen who are all sergeants.

The films main stars William Holden (who I'm not overly familiar with but fans of the show MASH might recognise his name as being the lead of "The Moon Is Blue"), for me the biggest name or most easily identified face was Peter Graves (better known as Mr Phelps of Mission Impossible).

The film deals with life in a very crowded POW camp but its main theme is the enemy within as the prisoners are always thwarted in escape or concealment by a spy in their midst. They think this spy is Sefton (Holden) as he is a black market trader who often deals with the Germans.

The film follows their attempts of escape and to flush out their traitor, you will think everyone and anyone could be the guilty party and its a great twist when the spy is finally revealed. The film isn't very well known and really does deserves great recognition as it paved the way for all the other POW movies as this was the very 1st one.

It uses pathos and intrigue in equal measures to show how the prisoners use jokes and pranks to raise their morale and try and get one over on the Germans.