“Stalag 17” provides a thoughtful commentary on human resilience and camaraderie under extremely dire circumstances.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 27, 2024

both a mordant comedy and a stark drama, a character study and an invigorating thriller

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 27, 2024

The drama survives intact but the humor proves to be a serious drag.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 25, 2023

In Stalag 17 a crackling good movie has been fashioned from a crackling good play.

| Nov 5, 2022

The suspect sergeant, an opportunist hated and patronized by the men he exploits, is extraordinarily well played by William Holden. Bidding neither for sympathy nor any particular understanding. Holden's Sefton is no conventional war play hero.

| Nov 5, 2022

Billy Wilder, one of the most caustic-minded of Hollywood's writer-director-producers, has taken a stage hit by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski and preserved its essential humor and tragedy with no dulling of its corrosive edges.

| Nov 5, 2022

Wilder has kept his direction hard-hitting and has sharpened the characterizations of the men with many revealing and forthright touches.

| Nov 5, 2022

This picture you have to see... while It deals remotely with war, it definitely is more on the happy side... a fine laugh deal, with suspense beautifully interlaced.

| Nov 5, 2022

Though its setting is grim, [Stalag 17] rises above its unhappy circumstances to become one of the funniest comedy-melodramas of the year.

| Nov 5, 2022

It is a comedy drama that is both comic and dramatic.

| Nov 5, 2022

One of the year’s better films, a taut, shrewdly observant melodrama several notches above its stage original.

| Nov 5, 2022

A smash hit on Broadway two years ago, the Donald Bevan-Edmund Trzcinski play about what passed for life in a German prison camp comes to the screen as an even more successful blend of melodrama and rough, occupational comedy.

| Nov 5, 2022

A truly remarkable job has been done in toning down Stalag 17 from the stage version while preserving the rowdy profane humor as well as the melodrama which made this play a solid Broadway hit.

| Nov 5, 2022

William Holden, as Sefton, is tops, registers solidly with another one of his well-shaded screen-portrayals.

| Nov 5, 2022

It's really a thriller, in that there is a tone of authenticity about it.

| Nov 5, 2022

[Wilder] seems to be unaware that realism without pity is not only ugly but also, in the long run, deadly dull.

| Nov 5, 2022

What happened here between the stage and the screen we wouldn't venture to say but what was hailed as a hit play on Broadway has been turned into something leas than that as a picture.

| Nov 5, 2022

Wilder has turned the original into a highly satisfactory film which we can all cheer for general excellence.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 5, 2022

The drama is interspersed with generous helpings of clowning on the part of two of the more colorful prisoners, and provides good comic relief.

| Nov 5, 2022

The real charm of the film lies in its character portrayals.

| Nov 5, 2022