Christmas at Stalag 17

Revisiting Billy Wilder’s masterfully funny and suspenseful prisoner-of-war film

“One of us is a stoolie.” 

The setting is a German camp for American prisoners of war, about a week before Christmas, 1944. To the frustrated inmates of Stalag 17 – all downed airmen, all sergeants – the war feels far from over, and the little news they get is bleak. The German army has just retaken the Ardennes, beginning the Battle of the Bulge. Patton’s reinforcements are stalled and the Allied air forces grounded by poor weather. The commandant of Stalag 17 announces that each barrack will get a copy of Mein Kampf as a Christmas present, so the prisoners can better acquaint themselves with the Führer’s teachings now that German victory is in sight. As an additional “special treat,” all the prisoners will be “de-loused for the holidays,” with ice water.

But the men in Barrack Four have a more important problem. After their jailers foil an escape attempt, seemingly tipped off in advance, the men start to wonder if there’s a spy among them. When the barrack’s resident cynic, J.J Sefton (played with aplomb by William Holden), comes under suspicion, he vows to prove his innocence – and ferret out the real culprit. 

When I tell people that my favorite Christmas movie is a dark comedy-melodrama-thriller about soldiers in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, I tend to get a slightly puzzled reaction. It’s true, though. I was first introduced to Stalag 17 as a child by my mother, herself a lover of film and of the writer-director Billy Wilder in particular¹, and the movie has only grown in my esteem since. I have other holiday favorites – It’s a Wonderful Life, yes, and Whit Stillman’s sparkling Metropolitan – but as the days get shorter and the calendar creeps toward Christmas, I get most excited to watch Stalag 17. If Die Hard or even Eyes Wide Shut are Christmas movies, I’m claiming Wilder’s masterfully witty, suspenseful, and satisfying 1953 war film as mine. 

Wilder was such an accomplished and prolific filmmaker that even some fans of his work – which includes such classics as Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950, reportedly Donald Trump’s favorite film), Ace in the Hole (1951), Sabrina (1954), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Some Like It Hot (1959), and The Apartment (1960) – haven’t seen Stalag 17; many lists of his greatest films don’t count it in the top five. That’s a shame. Some Like It Hot may be funnier, Sunset Boulevard moodier, Ace in the Hole more acerbic, but Stalag 17 takes a generous pinch of each and adds a finale less contrived than Witness for the Prosecution’s famous twist ending and even more gripping. 

Much has been said of Wilder’s talent for mixing light and dark – his “sour-sweet” sensibility, in the words of his later writing partner IAL Diamond – and Stalag 17, which Wilder produced, directed, and co-wrote, with Edwin Blum, may be the height of that synthesis. This is a film with moments of physical comedy that wouldn’t be too out of place in the Marx brothers, as well as indelible and understated dramatic performances; a movie whose first and last ten minutes contain chilling scenes of unarmed men being machine-gunned to death that also includes the line “I’m telling you, Animal, these Nazis ain’t kosher.” Stalag 17 mocks and subverts patriotism and jingoism, then wrings from its own cynicism a triumphant, crowd-pleasing cheer. 

Adapted from a Broadway play of the same name by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski, who based it on their experiences as Second World War internees, the film is about Americans thousands of miles from home, deep in the geographic heart of Hitler’s empire, but also maddeningly far from the fighting. As the film’s narrator, Cookie (Gil Stratton), notes, this is a combustible situation – a bunch of hotheaded NCOs trapped together in tedium and privation, in a mud-filled compound whose preening commandant, Colonel von Scherbach (the delightful Otto Preminger), brags of his “unblemished” record: no one has ever escaped Stalag 17.

The inmates of Barrack Four – especially the barrack chief, Hoffman (Richard Erdman), head of security, Price (Peter Graves), and the volatile and gungho Duke (Neville Brand) – are determined to break that streak. Yet they’ve started to notice that information discussed in the dark of the barracks, American to American, has an odd tendency to reach the Nazis’ ears.

In the meantime, the men simmer, argue, and try to cope with their boredom. They taunt their unctuous guard, Sergeant Schultz (Sig Ruman), hold cesspool “yacht races,” gamble, and leer at female Russian prisoners in a neighboring compound. The town crier, Marko (William Pierson), hands out mail from home – often unpaid bills – and delivers announcements in a nasal screech. The barracks clowns, Shapiro (Harvey Lembeck) and “Animal” Kuzawa (Robert Strauss), do their best to get on everyone’s nerves. The mute, shell-shocked Joey (Robinson Stone) watches everything in silence, haunted and haunting. 

Many of the men’s recreations are commercial schemes organized by Sefton, a shrewd entrepreneur who trades unapologetically with the German guards and amasses foot-lockers full of cigarettes and black-market goods. Already unpopular and somewhat of a loner, the jaded and derisive Sefton makes a natural suspect when the men begin to fear a German informant. The situation takes on even more urgency when two new prisoners, Bagradian (Jay Lawrence) and Dunbar (Don Taylor), arrive, and the men learn that the SS is planning to arrest and execute Dunbar. 

And so the film hums along to its tense denouement, wry comedy giving way to taut suspense, all fun and games until there’s a switchblade quivering from a table. (Maybe 12 Angry Men, which debuted as a similarly claustrophobic teleplay a year after Stalag 17, couldn’t resist the urge to copy that touch with the knife.)

Wilder began his career as a tabloid journalist in interwar Vienna and always considered himself a screenwriter first and director second; like his mentor, the great Ernst Lubitsch, he believed that a film is no more than the strength of its writing. He jealously guarded his scripts from meddling producers; tailored characters to the actors playing them, but hated improvisation; and disliked showy camerawork that might call attention to itself and distract from the story. Stalag 17 is a film more likely to be recalled for its crackling plot than its visual treatment. 

That, however, is to short-change an elegant black-and-white film brimming with deft filmmaking. It has become a cliché to lament what Marvel movies and other franchises have done to cinema, but to watch Stalag 17 is to experience some sense of loss. In contrast to the murky, green-screen disasters of today, we viscerally feel the cramped, bunk-cluttered darkness of Barrack Four even as beautiful blocking, lighting, and cinematography ensure we see the characters perfectly. The film is filled with small, thoughtful touches, of body language, of shadow and silhouette, of syncing of motion to music and narration, that Wilder and his collaborators probably thought of as unremarkable but now feel like water to the parched. 

In one of Stalag 17’s truly great scenes – and perhaps my favorite in any film, ever – the men hold a barracks holiday party, complete with a Christmas tree ornamented with dog tags. A phonograph blares a rousing rendition of “Johnny Comes Marching Home.” The old battle song is a middle-finger to the Third Reich as well as a projection of the men’s fantasies of a triumphant homecoming; as they march around the barrack, singing, and the patriotic anthem swells and builds (“Get ready for the jubilee! / We’re gonna cheer him three times three!”), we’re treated to the identity of the fifth column in their midst – then see, in a thrilling closeup, that Sefton is starting to put the pieces together, too. 

The film is rich with this stuff: A chessboard becomes the nexus of a battle of wits between patriot and traitor. A looped electrical cord is the noose by which someone metaphorically hangs himself. A match struck on a man’s stubble leaves him rubbing his cheek with the bashfulness of a wallflower who’s just been kissed. 

POW movies, like submarine thrillers or any other subgenre, have come to have certain tropes. Stalag 17 has escape tunnels, heated discussions about the laws of war, and the almost obligatory scene of men in drag. Wilder’s entry isn’t a moving humanist masterpiece, like Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion (1937), or a lush and self-consciously “big” movie, like David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, in which Holden played a similarly pessimistic character), but something more modest and popcorny, which may be its enduring strength. 

It seems notable that probably the most famous POW movie, The Great Escape (1963) – itself one of Britain’s most popular Christmas films – came out a full decade after Stalag 17 and boasts bigger stars, sets, and stunts, but has, for its charms, aged worse. That’s probably because Stalag 17, despite the limits of its time, is more willing to lean into the grit. Neither of the two films contains a real profanity. Yet where the imprisoned officers of The Great Escape are sexless Boy Scouts, speaking constantly of duty and teamwork, Stalag 17’s are embittered and lusty. The Great Escape, a Technicolor epic with a pushy score, is all about British cheek and stiff upper lip; in the more film noir, chiaroscuro Stalag 17, Sefton’s cheek and lip are busted because his American countrymen beat the shit out of him.

Stalag 17’s one weakness may be the unsubtle comic relief of the Shapiro and “Animal” characters, which can be a little incongruous and tiring; otherwise, the movie has aged like fine bottled-in-bond, to use Sefton’s phrase. Aside from Strauss’s vaudevillian “Animal,” the performances are naturalistic, with none of the stagey affectation that modern audiences tend to find alienating in older films. William Holden, seeping quiet charisma, plays Sefton with such a soft touch you forget he’s acting, and the film easily counts seven or eight equally pitch-perfect performances. 

Wilder also allows the German characters to speak in long snatches of untranslated German, though the audience is never in too much doubt about what they’re saying. In an irony common to postwar Hollywood, Stalag 17’s chief Nazi villain is played with swagger by Preminger, who, like Wilder, was a German-speaking Jew. 

Wilder himself fled Berlin in 1933, twenty-four hours after the Reichstag fire. He moved to Paris, then made his way to the United States. He learned English from scratch, eagerly absorbing it from taxi drivers and Ivy Leaguers alike, as his biographer Gene D. Phillips notes, but never lost his accent. His mother, stepfather, and grandmother were murdered in the Holocaust. Perhaps this makes it all the more remarkable that Wilder, in Stalag 17, chooses to focus less on the Nazis’ evil and menace than on their essential ridiculousness. These are the kind of toadying militarists, Wilder sees, who might put on riding boots to take a phone call. 

Stalag 17’s characters don’t know – and Wilder, perhaps because it was more common knowledge when the film came out, doesn’t tell us – but the day after Christmas, 1944, Patton’s Third Army broke through German lines, relieving the besieged 101st Airborne, driving the Germans back toward Berlin, and helping to bring about the beginning of the end of Hitler’s empire. The men in Barrack Four have no idea, but they just got the best Christmas present of all.

1. This essay is dedicated to my mother, Greta, with Yuletide wishes — JOC