Context is everything in movies. In any particular scene, a line of dialogue can elicit hearty laughs if given the right set-up while the same exact line might cause an audience to break down into tears when used in a different situation. The idea of context is just as important for directors and, to a lesser extent, actors. It can be helpful for the viewer to look at a film within the director’s larger filmography, especially taking into consideration where the filmmaker was at that point in his career. A perfect example of the importance of context is Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17, released in 1953 and made after the smashing critical success of Sunset Blvd. and the potentially crushing disappointment of Ace in the Hole. Adapted from a Broadway play by two men who had actually been in a POW camp, Edmund Trzcinski (who plays the recipient of a Dear John letter in the film) and Donald Bevan, the comedy-drama now looks like the beginning of Wilder’s “if it worked once, it might work again” approach to taking successful plays and books and making them personal, yet accessible films.

By increasingly filling his movies with both biting satiric comedy and jokes easily understood by the masses, Wilder wisely moved on from the commercial failure of Ace in the Hole, knowing success assured the director he could essentially make his own rules while still retaining the freedom of major studio budgets. Prior to Stalag 17, Wilder had mostly been directing dramatic films, notably Double Indemnity and then winning an Oscar for The Lost Weekend. Though many of the screenplays he wrote for other directors were comedies and his directorial debut, The Major and the Minor, was lighter fare, the large majority of his earlier films were steeped in a seriousness that rarely popped up afterwards. With Stalag 17, the filmmaker, perhaps better than in any of his other films, balanced a dire, almost hopeless situation with frequent retreats into laughter. Every Wilder drama has moments of humor and every Wilder comedy has an undercurrent of seriousness, but none of his other films dared to repeatedly show the lighter side of a subject as seemingly grave as a Nazi-run American prisoner-of-war camp. A generation before Robert Altman made M*A*S*H, Wilder unapologetically mixed laughter with war.

Using the director’s favorite narrative device, the voiceover, Wilder throws his audience into an American POW camp just before Christmas 1944. Our occasional narrator is Cookie, one of the men of Stalag 17 (Stalag, the German shorthand for a prisoner-of-war camp, was an abbreviation of the word Stammlager) and the only ally of the film’s protagonist, J.J. Sefton. In an attempted escape, two American prisoners from Sefton’s barracks are soon shot and killed after emerging out of a tunnel. All of their fellow captives are optimistic that the two men will make it through alive, except Sefton. Just after the two men have initiated their escape, Sefton lays down a couple of packs of cigarettes on their execution. The ever cynical Sefton cleans up when the men are shot down, never displaying a shred of emotion. Every prisoner has found a way to cope with his imprisonment, whether it’s through impaired reality or the elimination of the outside world completely, but Sefton appears to be the only one who’s decided to use it to his advantage. Where the others are hopeful idealists, Sefton’s a realist biding his time until he can enjoy freedom once again.

As tensions continue between Sefton and the others, two new prisoners replace the failed escapees - Lieutenant Dunbar (Don Taylor), whose name Sefton recognizes as part of a wealthy Boston family, and an actor who entertains with movie star impressions (Jay Lawrence, real-life brother of F-Troop’s Larry Storch). After repeated plans of action are intercepted by the Germans and Lt. Dunbar is fingered for blowing up an ammunitions train prior to being captured, the prisoners realize one of the men is telling the Nazis their every move. Since Sefton has a well-stocked supply of alcohol, cigarettes and various other goods, which he uses to bribe his way past Nazi guards into the Russian female prisoners’ quarters, he becomes the leading suspect. His surliness towards the other men surely doesn’t help matters. Their suspicion climaxes in a physical attack on Sefton, holding him down and bruising his face when their paranoia caroms out of control. Even Sefton’s loyal helper Cookie eventually begins to suspect him. Though he’s not interested in popularity contests and doesn’t seem too concerned with being ostracized, Sefton realizes that identifying the real spy may be his ticket out of the POW camp, with the added bonus of a potential reward for returning Dunbar to his wealthy family.

William Holden won an Academy Award playing Sefton, an iconoclast who perfectly embodies the Wilder opportunist that we’ve seem so often in his films. It’s not surprising that Wilder all but identified him as the character most like himself from one of his films. He’s a remarkably different kind of hero, one who looks after number one more than his fellow soldiers and values survival above all else. You could say he even anticipates the antiheroes made famous in American films of the 1970s. Holden deserved his Oscar, despite initially turning down the role out of concern for the character’s unwavering cynicism and being uneasy with some of Sefton’s choices. The actor had worked with Wilder before in Sunset Blvd., when the filmmaker revived Holden’s foundering career, so it would seem that he should have anticipated a different kind of hero role and a director unwilling to budge from his ideas. Like many a Wilder protagonist, Sefton is in it for himself, nearly to a fault. He seems completely unconcerned with the welfare of anyone else, treating the Nazis no worse than the other men in his barracks.

Those other prisoners, specifically the characters of Animal and Shapiro, provide the film’s comic relief (along with director Otto Preminger, as the Nazi commandant, putting on his boots for a phone call). As Animal, Robert Strauss was Oscar-nominated for the Betty Grable-obsessed character, a combination of three Marx brothers with a dash of Moe Howard’s commanding assertiveness. His buddy Shapiro, played by Harvey Lembeck, seems to keep Animal grounded through distractions like sneaking over to the Russian females’ de-lousing shower and cross-dressing to temporarily recreate a Betty Grable pin-up picture. This humor, poignantly portrayed by the two actors who also played their roles in the original Broadway version, is painted with broad strokes but still can’t conceal the painful uncertainty of the two men’s fates. Their actions are merely an example of personal coping and shouldn’t be diminished as a denial of the unpleasant circumstances that often accompany war.

Wilder actually wrings more emotion out of the frequently funny Stalag 17 than he had any film before, and few afterwards. With the prisoners’ rendition of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” as Sefton lies recovering from his wounds in bed, slowly putting the pieces together concerning who’s the spy, Wilder skillfully turns the moment into a heart-wrenching culmination of patriotic bravery and defiant heroism. It’s a dagger of emotion that reminds the viewer what’s at stake for these men. Even if Sefton’s actions always remain primarily self-serving (and it’s difficult to argue that his unmasking of the German was for love of country or fellow servicemen), he’s a hero nonetheless. He raises morale and eliminates the German spy while securing the freedom of two American soldiers.

The special edition DVD released by Paramount last year is a marked improvement over their previous disc. The image quality is drastically better, absent the dirt and debris that plagued the first release. Since there’s a strange absence of a DVD Beaver review for either disc, much less a comparison, my memory of the first release is all I have to go on, but I do remember being disappointed with that transfer when I watched it. The new version has a remarkably sharp picture, consistent with Paramount’s usual high standard. They also tossed on two featurettes, one recounting details of the making of the film and the other about the real Stalag XVII B camp, as well as a commentary teaming actors Gil Stratton (Cookie) and Richard Erdman (Hoffy) with playwright Donald Bevan. I’d like to have seen Peter Graves participate in the featurette and/or the commentary and wonder why he’s absent. The only real negative to the DVD is Paramount’s insistence on including forced trailers. If I wanted to see John Wayne movies or Titanic then I’d buy those DVDs. When I put in Stalag 17, that’s what I’d like to watch.

There’s apparently another aspect of Stalag 17 worth discussing, one that conveniently returns me to my initial mention of context. It’s the idea that Wilder lets Sefton’s characteristic cynicism shrivel at the end, with a wave and a grin. DVD Savant’s review devotes a paragraph to this proposition, mentioning several nameless critics who’ve identified the action as Wilder’s “’sell-out’ moment.” Since I admittedly didn’t dredge through every review I could find of the film, I’ll have to pick on what the Savant wrote. He also makes the point that “the gesture is sincere,” something I disagree with just as much as the idea that Sefton (or Wilder) goes soft here. I see it much more as a “see ya, suckers” kind of moment. If Billy Wilder made it today, one could imagine Sefton’s salute and smile being replaced by a middle finger.

Context is key here because Sefton had just said to these men, fellow soldiers who had beaten and accused him of being a Nazi collaborator despite his denials, “If I ever run into any of you bums on a street corner, just let’s pretend we never met before.” Not exactly a friendly goodbye. Sefton then heads down into the tunnel hole, and pops back up just to boastfully give the salute. If there’s a twinkle in his eye when Sefton grins, it would seem to be from knowing he’s about to get out of this hellhole while they all remain. The only hint of sincerity relies on the viewer’s subjectivity. If you want to believe Sefton “breaks character” then I think you’re going against the weight of the evidence laid forth throughout the entire film, but that’s your right as a viewer. If you choose to think Sefton’s mentally mounting his private revenge with that smile then that’s your option as well. I just can’t believe a director as uncompromising as Billy Wilder would purposefully betray what he’s worked two hours to establish if another logical explanation is available.

From DVD Savant’s review and what seems to be a general lack of critical interest, I don’t perceive the film as garnering the accolades currently received by many of the director’s other films from the 1950s. However, even if it’s the fourth-best Wilder film of the decade, which I’d attest it is, that’s still quite the endorsement. His most fruitful decade of moviemaking was arguably as accomplished as any other director’s ever. Hitchcock certainly had an impressive run in both the 40s and 50s, and Altman’s output from the 1970s now looks incredible, but Wilder churned out nine good to great films in the ten year period, co-writing all of them. Each has its merits and a few (The Seven Year Itch, for one) admittedly lack the charm of Wilder’s best, but there’s not a certifiable dud to be found in the lot. When looking for sheer entertainment value, Stalag 17 is probably the one that’s most enjoyable. It’s compelling, with a great lead performance from William Holden, and captivating, even though it has minimal action sequences.

Following the film’s success, others took note and POW films like The Great Escape and, most blatantly, television shows like Hogan’s Heroes tried to mimic the tone Wilder set with his movie by eliminating the stoic seriousness that had previously been found in war films in favor of a less gloomy approach. Missing was Sefton’s (and Wilder’s) cynicism, which gave Stalag 17 some bite not found in its imitators. For all those chastising Wilder for playing it safe with Stalag 17 (I’m thinking again of DVD Savant’s review, which has other aspects of contention also), how many other filmmakers were inserting broad humor into prisoner-of-war films less than a decade after the war ended? Where Wilder was so successful and nearly unmatched in film was the precise balance of knowing when to make the audience laugh and when to sober them up, all the while resisting the temptation to be overly manipulative.

At ease…at ease!