Word: stalag
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...screenplay and inspiration in performance. One might think that Elusive Corporal evokes nothing and essentially tells nothing because it is an adaptation from a novel instead of an original Renoir creation. But the theft of ideas from other films is unforgivable and infuriating. Remember that hilarious scene in Stalag 17 when Harry and Animal paint a white line down the middle of the road to the Russian women's compound? Renoir turned his team of escapers into road measurers instead of painters. Escape from Colditz, A British film of the early fifties, had a scene in which two escapees stowed...
...Great Escape. "We have put all our rotten eggs in one basket," says the commandant of Stalag Luft North to the senior officer of a newly arrived group of Allied officer prisoners, "and we intend to watch that basket very carefully. With your cooperation, we may all sit out the war very comfortably." But every man in the maximum-security camp knows it is an officer's duty to escape and harass the enemy. The Great Escape, based on Paul Brickhill's first-hand account, tells in almost hypnotic detail how a mixed bag of P.W.s work together...
...Bavarian forests near Munich, Producer-Director John Sturges has rebuilt Stalag 3, and his Great Escape shows promise of being the best P.O.W. picture since Stalag 17-closely following the bestselling personal-experience story written by Paul Brickhill. Underground, Tom, Dick and Harry are ingenious; they are rigged up with improvised cable cars, electric lights and pumping stations. But above ground the prison camp has an authenticity that is frightening, and visitors instinctively flinch under the guard towers high above masses of barbed wire...
...worried about Jane." says proud Henry Fonda, "but what about Peter? The day will probably come when he'll be stealing roles away from me." Peter's stage experience began in early boarding school days when he wrote, produced and performed in a play called Stalag 17½. In prep school (Connecticut's Westminster), he organized a sort of Young Vic called the Wampus Players. "A wampus," by his definition, "is a mythical cat. very large like a dragon, and he doesn't do anything but eat fair maidens." But despite all this extracurricular promise...
Exuberant Vulgarity. On his own, Billy wrote, produced and directed a savage social satire (Ace in the Hole) that flopped hard, then came back handily with Stalag 17, Sabrina, Seven Year Itch, Love in the Afternoon, Witness for the Prosecution. All these films were made from scripts that Billy himself had written-though always in collaboration. "Most of Billy's collaborators," says a friend, "are just $50,000 secretaries." They sit at a typewriter while Billy strides feverishly up and down, slashing the air with a swagger stick, frothing at the mouth with dialogue and situation...