Word: trzcinski
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...same crude device employed to sabotage a Nazi munitions train in the Trzcinski and Bevan play and movie Stalag...
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...
...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. Don Taylor, Richard Erdman, Harvey Lembeck, Peter Graves and Co-Author Trzcinski himself play P.W.s. Robert Strauss repeats his stage role as Animal, a big, hairy oaf who lumbers around in long winter underwear dreaming out loud about-Betty Grable...
...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...
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...