Stalag 17 (1953)
Genre: Dramas
Starring: William Holden, Don Taylor, Otto Preminger, Neville Brand, Peter Graves
DVD Info
Release:
Mar 21, 2006
DVD Features:
- Region 1
- Keep Case - Sensormatic
- Full Frame - 1.33
Audio:
- Dolby Digital Mono 1.0 - English
- Dolby Digital Mono 1.0 - French
Additional Release Material:
- Audio Commentary - 1. Richard Erdman - Actor
- 2. Gil Stratton - Actor
- 3. Donald Bevan - Co-Playwright
- Featurettes - 1. "Stalag 17: From Reality to Screen"
- 2. "The Real Heroes Of Stalag XVIIB"
- Text/Photo Galleries
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
Interesting depiction with a pretty decent performance from Holden and supported by a credible cast.
A bleak, black comedy in which the laughter can die in the throat.
The resulting letdown is terrific, but along the way there is some of the funniest men-at-loose-ends interplay that Wilder has ever put on film.
One could make an argument that, among 20th century directors, few were more versatile than Billy Wilder.
A lusty comedy-melodrama, loaded with bold, masculine humor and as much of the original's uninhibited earthiness as good taste and the Production Code permit.
Unforgettable Billy Wilder POW tale with Holden in perhaps his greatest role.
As with many of Wilder's films, you tend to forget just how funny it is %u2014 the way the master director cuts tension with incisive wit and barely controlled silliness.
The good greatly outweighs the bad, particularly in the profile of Holden's character, a pragmatic, self-centered cynic whose heroism, when it is finally called upon, appears to come from deep within the barriers he has placed inside of himself.
Grimly hilarious, subversive and defiant, rough around the edges, and more than a little sad.
Unlike previous POW films, Wilder and co-writer Edwin Blum's script, based on the play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski, presents the prisoners not as paragons of patriotic virtue but as real, self-interested, bored soldiers trying to survive.
Classic prisoner-of-war flick, powered by Holden's indelible performance
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