Stalag 17 (1953)

Friendly Nazis guard ungrateful rule-breaking American POWs

You might be fooled into thinking Stalag 17 is a gritty POW camp drama. And yes, at the outset, two American GIs are gunned down during an escape attempt. The camp thinks J.J. Sefton (William Holden) revealed the plan to the Germans, so Sefton has to clear his name by finding the real snitch. And sure, this could be the basis of a gritty movie, but in Stalag 17, it’s a mere sideshow to the comedy that is the true plot of the movie. Yeah, Stalag 17 is basically “Hogan’s Heroes.”¹

“Animal” Kuzawa (Robert Strauss) and Harry Shapiro (Harvey Lembeck) channel their inner Hope & Crosby and treat Stalag 17 like it’s Road to Prisoner of War Camp. Their hijinks are deeply enjoyable: gambling on rat races, sneaking into the Russian women’s delousing tent, dressing up as Betty Grable to lift the camp’s spirits.

I mean, this movie is clearly a comedy: 

“IS YOU ALL GOOD LITTLE ADOLFS?”

Whenever the slice-of-life POW camp stuff is interrupted with low-grade spy thriller nonsense, it’s a bummer. Maybe I’m not the best judge, though. I’ve always liked “Hogan’s Heroes.”

Rating: 7/10, but it’d be a 10/10 if it were a 23-minute sitcom episode

Cast and Crew

We last saw William Holden in his star-making turn in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). Stalag 17 was Holden and Wilder’s second film together; their third, Sabrina (1954) with Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn, was also a big hit.² Holden plays cynical, somewhat unpleasant characters in both Boulevard and Stalag and he won’t be any fun in the next film we see him in either.

Though this is a Billy Wilder film, legendary director Otto Preminger has an acting role as Colonel von Scherbach. Preminger, an Austrian stage actor and director, began his career in Hollywood directing films noirs³ and Ruritanian romances.⁴ Along with co-starring with Holden in Stalag, Preminger also directed him in the “scandalous” The Moon is Blue (1953).⁵ He also had an affair—and a child—with burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee. We’ll see Preminger again in this column as a director.

Harvey Lembeck, who played Shapiro, parlayed his success in Stalag 17 into a role as Sgt. Bilko’s sidekick in the sitcom “The Phil Silvers Show.” He also was in six of the quintessentially-‘60s Beach Party movies that starred Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. His character, biker Eric von Zipper, was styled off Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953) and popularized the phrase “him, I like.”

The Trivia

Look, I don’t want to talk about Alvin and the Chipmunks. And I tried! Their creator, Ross Bagdasarian, was in Viva Zapata!, but I casually ignored it. But now he’s in Stalag 17, so fine, chipmunks, here we go.

Bagdasarian had a #1 hit in April 1958 with the novelty song “Witch Doctor,” performed under the name Dave Seville. When his label requested more crappy novelty songs, he decided to use his witch doctor voice (it’s his voice, just sped up) for three singing anthropomorphic chipmunks.⁶ Dave Seville and the Chipmunks then scored the December 1958 #1 hit with “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late).” A litany of insufferable songs, TV shows, and movies followed.

The sped-up voice technique was later used by Sheb Wooley (hey, he was in High Noon!) to do “The Purple People Eater,” which is another unlistenable mess of a song. The Big Bopper then made “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor,” which is also awful—though its B-side was “Chantilly Lace,” Big’s biggest hit (and finally a song I can link to in good faith).  

In Stalag 17, Animal is in love with a picture of Betty Grable, so let’s talk about her a bit. Nicknamed “The Pin-Up Queen” with “the Million Dollar Legs,”⁷ Grable was the number-one pinup during WWII, bigger than even Rita Hayworth.

Grable once said, “I became a star for two reasons, and I'm standing on them.”

After marrying and divorcing Jackie Coogan, she married Harry James, a famed bandleader.⁸ A few of her movies to know: Mother Wore Tights (1947), about vaudeville, and Call Me Mister (1951), about her entertaining soldiers in occupied Japan.

At the end of Grable’s run she filmed How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) with Marilyn Monroe. Grable was rumored to feud with Monroe, as she worried that Fox might be grooming Monroe to be their newest star. Grable would know all about that, as her own breakout led to her replacement of—and long-running feud with—actress Alice Faye. 

Odds and Ends

The play version of Stalag 17 was directed by José Ferrer, who we’ve seen as both Cyrano and Toulouse-Lautrec…don’t confuse Stalag 17 with “Mila 18,” the 1961 Leon Uris WWII novel about Jewish resistance fighters in occupied Poland⁹...Sefton requests Guy Lombardo on the radio; Lombardo’s a Canadian bandleader¹⁰ most famous for his New Year’s Eve performances of Auld Lang Syne....Sefton, when serving his schnapps, asks if the boys expected it to be “bottled-in-bond”; anything with that label is bottled at 100 proof, aged four years, and distilled by one distiller at one American distillery in one season...“When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” a song featured prominently in the movie, is #6637 in the Roud Folk Song Index and provides the melody for the children’s song “The Ants Go Marching.” 

Oh, and the makers of “Hogan’s Heroes”? Yeah, they were sued by the writers of “Stalag 17” (the play) for copyright infringement. But is it really copyright infringement if you copy something but leave out all the bad parts? Oh, it is? Oh, okay.

1. If you grew up touching grass instead of watching “Hogan’s Heroes” (1965-1971), know that it’s a zany, lighthearted sitcom set in a German POW camp where the prisoners conduct covert operations under the noses of their bumbling captors, Col. Klink and Sgt. Schultz.

2. Sabrina’s funny: it’s a movie about a chauffeur's daughter (Hepburn) who becomes the object of affection of two wealthy brothers (Bogart and Holden). Bogart ends up with the girl in the movie, but in real life, Hepburn couldn’t stand Bogie and actually had an affair with Holden.

3. Including the Gene Tierney murder mystery Laura (1944). Also, if you want to talk about the plural of “film noir,” it’s either “film noirs” (just jamming an “s” on the end), “films noir” (pluralizing just the noun, like in “attorneys general” or “culs-de-sac”), or “films noirs” (following the French convention of pluralizing both the noun and the adjective).

4. “Ruritania” being a fictional Central or Eastern European country that provides a fairy tale setting for romance, monarchical intrigue, dashing heroes, and adventure.

5. The Moon is Blue apparently caused a hubbub for its use of the word “virgin.” (That’s why I put “scandalous” in scare quotes.)

6. The backstory for the chipmunks (Alvin, Simon, and Theodore) was that Dave Seville was both their manager and their adoptive father. Yeah, adopted father. I’m not gonna go into a whole bunch of lore about it.

7. The nickname came from the comedy Million Dollar Legs (1939). Those would be $22,088,201 legs in 2023 dollars.

8. Though watch out! A different bandleader, Artie Shaw, married actresses Ava Gardner and Lana Turner—and six other women! Bandleaders, man.

9. “Mila 18” led to a name change for the Joseph Heller novel originally titled “Catch-18”; famed editor Robert Gottlieb didn’t want people to confuse the books, and anyway, he thought “22” was funnier. I reflected a bit on whether “22” was funnier than “18” and, I gotta tell you, that time was completely wasted.

10. Bandleaders, man.