Word: stalag
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...younger brother of Gunsmoke star James Arness, Graves arrived in Hollywood by 1950 and got his first important role, as the all-American soldier who turns out to be a German spy in Billy Wilder's 1953 war comedy Stalag 17. The film provided an early view of Graves' ability to play both a hero type and its own internal contradiction. Throughout the '50s he alternated supporting parts in big films (The Night of the Hunter, The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell) with leads in It Conquered the World and other sci-fi anticlassics ripe for later mockery on Mystery...
...hoped, to freedom," said British pilot Bertram (Jimmy) James of his exploits as a prisoner of war and a perennially frustrated escape artist. "That wasn't quite the case." After taking part in the most famous attempt of World War II--the mass exit from Poland's Stalag Luft III, depicted in the 1963 film The Great Escape-- James survived a labor camp and went on to work in Britain's diplomatic service. James...
...shifts our perspective. Inevitably, we start thinking about other POW escape movies and judging this one by their fictionally enhanced standards. Dengler becomes, in this incarnation, an almost merry soul, dauntlessly rallying his bedraggled troops (there are only six men in this camp). We're obviously not talking Stalag 17 or The Great Escape here, but stray thoughts of movies in that mode inevitably tug at our minds and somewhat vitiate the power of this...
DIED. Lee Gordon, 84, the first U.S. prisoner of war to escape a German camp during World War II; in Menlo Park, Calif. In October 1943, after two failed attempts to flee Stalag VIIA, he used a fake ID tag to enter an outdoor work area, sneaked past a distracted guard and walked away. He reunited with Allies through a French Resistance group, arriving a free man in England a year later. In the 2000 TV documentary Escape from a Living Hell, he recalled stumbling, free, into a French café: "The waitress walked up to me. I looked...
...first 80 names on the list of American prisoners to be transferred from the Stalag IX-B POW camp to the underground tunnels of the small concentration camp on the banks of the river Elster were all recognizably Jewish. These 80 American Jews had already been segregated into a separate barracks at the POW camp, despite the attempts by some of them to destroy their dog tags—which the U.S. Army had engraved with an “H” for Hebrew. Many lied about their “race” when interrogated. In one instance...