Stalag 17

Stalag 17. 1953 Paramount Pictures.
Starring: William Holden, Don Taylor, Otto Preminger, Robert Strauss, Peter Graves, Neville Brand, Sig Ruman, Gil Stratton
Director: Billy Wilder
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A film adaption of Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski's stage play that started in May of 1951. Both Bevan and Trzcinski were prisoners of war. Stalag 17 also is believed to have inspired the sitcom Hogan's Heroes, although this is not the case.

Narrated by Clarence Harvey "Cookie" Cook (Stratton), the movie starts on "the longest night of the year" in 1994 at a prisoner-of-war camp somewhere along the Danube. Two soldiers try to escape through a tunnel dug underneath the barbed wire, but are shot down as soon as they emerge from the other end. The prisoners believe there's a spy in their ranks, but the security officer for the barracks, Price (Graves), fails to find out who. Sefton (Holden, who won an Oscar for Best Actor in this one) is considered the main suspect, as the others are suspicious of his constant fraternization with the enemy, bartering for goods and food when he isn't organizing mouse races and other profitable enterprises.

The prisoners' lives are depicted as not as harsh as you might expect for a prisoner-of-war camp, but most of the soldiers still despise their surroundings, and do their best to get the better of the camp's commandant Oberst von Scherbach (Preminger). A radio is used by all of the barracks to tune in the BBC and the war news, until a guard, Sergeant Schulz (Ruman) confiscates it. After Sefton is spotted spending a day in the women's barracks in the Russian section of the camp, the soldiers conclude that he was rewarded for allegedly informing the Germans about the radio, and he is accused of being the spy when he comes back. He is beaten, ostracized, and his belongings are taken and distributed to the rest of the prisoners. Sefton must find out the identity of the real spy to clear his name.

Recommended movie.