Word: stalag
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Though many had tried, none had ever escaped for long from Stalag-Luft III, deep in the heart of Germany. But past failures did not discourage Captain Richard Michael Clinton Codner of the Royal Artillery, a young (23) and bronzed Oxford undergraduate with a mop of black hair and a sensitive, mischievous face. Around the camp he was known as "a classical fellow, always reading Latin and he could spout it by the yard...
...Stalag 17 (by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski; produced by José Ferrer) is an unexpectedly bright little knickknack, considering the nature of its subject and the lateness of the season. Set in a Nazi prison barracks full of U.S. airmen, toward the end of World War II, it mixes a good deal of earthy comedy with lively if commonplace melodrama. Somebody in the barracks is plainly blabbing the prisoners' small secrets to the Nazis. And when there is something really serious to blab about - when a new prisoner confides that he set a Nazi train on fire...
...thriller, Stalag 17 chugs along a straight formula route. But it goes at a decent clip, and in its way is quite uncompromising; it never taints its hokum with anything the least bit real. The humor, coming from prisoners rigidly confined to a few acres, is itself rigidly confined to a few topics, most of them supremely physical. But the men themselves, with their gripes and their razzing, form a diverting cross section from a rough-cut Polish-American G.I. to a Back Bay blueblood...
Playwrights Bevan & Trzcinski, who met during their years in a German prison camp, provide a few glimpses of Nazi brutality. But in general they display sharper memories for what goes over on the stage than what went on in their stalag. Producer Ferrer, in his boisterous staging, equally neglects mind and heart for spine and funnybone...
...Later on, the German camp authorities became less efficient. In March 1944, using a patiently dug tunnel, some 80 P.O.W.s crushed out of Stalag-Luft III in a single night. Yet only a few escaped from Nazi territory. Of those recaptured, the Germans reported they shot...