Stalag 17 (1953) on Netflix
Two American airmen are shot dead escaping Stalag 17, a German prisoner-of-war camp. Barracks 4 blames an informant, and suspicion falls on J.J. Sefton, who trades with the guards.
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Trailer
Plot summary
In December 1944, the American airmen of Barracks 4 are held in Stalag 17, a German prisoner-of-war camp, and pass the time with a smuggled radio, the clowning of "Animal" Kuzawa and Harry Shapiro, and a telescope aimed at the Russian women in the next compound. Their barracks chief, Hoffy Hoffman, and Frank Price, the security officer, arrange for Manfredi and Johnson to escape. Both are shot dead. Convinced that someone tipped off the commandant, Oberst von Scherbach, the men fix on J.J. Sefton, who barters with the German guards and runs gambling and a still, with Clarence "Cookie" Cook as his paid helper. A captured lieutenant, James Dunbar, arrives after blowing up a munitions train, and Sefton recognizes him from officer's school.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Stalag 17 (1953)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The play behind the film was written by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski out of their own imprisonment in Stalag 17B in Austria. Trzcinski appears in the film as a prisoner, and the black-marketeer Sefton was loosely modeled on a flyer from his own barracks.
- Billy Wilder shot the film in chronological order, an unusually slow and costly way to work, and according to a later featurette the cast did not learn which of them was playing the informant until the final three days of shooting.
- Peter Graves said Paramount sat on the finished film for over a year, convinced nobody wanted to watch a prisoner-of-war picture. The return of American POWs from Korea in 1953 changed the studio's mind and it released the film on that angle.
- William Holden's Best Actor acceptance speech, "thank you, thank you", is one of the shortest on record because the broadcast had a hard cutoff. He then paid out of his own pocket for trade-paper advertisements thanking everyone, and said Burt Lancaster or Montgomery Clift should have won for From Here to Eternity.
- The prison camp was built on the John Show Ranch in Woodland Hills, and shooting started in February 1952 during California's rainy season, which supplied all the mud the compound needed. The site is now a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints meetinghouse.
- Two big names were in the running for the role of Sefton before the part was finally cast: both Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas were considered for it.
