Word: stalag
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...Stalag 17 (Paramount), the 1951 Broadway hit about a Nazi prison camp, is as rowdily entertaining on the screen as it was on the stage. In the play, Authors Edmund Trzcinski and Donald Devan drew on some of their experiences while they were interned with 40,000 other prisoners of war, mostly Russians, Poles and Czechs, in the real Stalag 17 near Krems, Austria. But any similarity between the actual Stalag and its dramatic counterpart is mostly coincidental. In the movie, the fictional events range from suspense (Who is the Nazi spy posing as an American prisoner in Barracks...
Unburdened with any particular sense of the realistic or humane, Stalag 17 is a heartless jape that manages to be both lively and amusing. The sardonic talents of Producer-Director-Co-Scenarist Billy (Sunset Boulevard) Wilder are well tuned to these rather ghoulish goings on. Taking the action out of the barrack confines and into the barbed-wire compound at intervals, he has made a fluent film of the play. He has also got crisp characterizations from his cast. William Holden gives one of his quietly competent performances as a cynical G.I. Otto Preminger and Sig Ruman play comedy Nazis...
...Stalag 17, after almost two years on the stage, is still kicking, not to mention kneeing, slugging, and buffooning. Concerned with the untimely story of Americans in a German prisoner-of-war camp, its permanence and deserved popularity can best be explained by a combination of the all-male cast's exuberant performance and the co-authors' exciting presentation of their World War II experiences...
...play is itself a blend of what writers Donald Vevan and Edmund Trzcinski call "comedy melodrama." The comic element is of an earthy, physical sort, inversely proportional to the supply of women. But it convulsed more of the audience than it embarrassed. Although not so funny as Mr. Roberts, Stalag 17 has an added element of melodrama. Tension arises when the prisoners' sabotage and escape plots fail with crushing regularity, making it apparent that one amongst them is a German informer. Their efforts to discover the culprit (they had a better word for him) provide grim and gripping moments between...
...other four: Twentieth Century, Stalag 17, The Fourposter, The Shrike...