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 4?) to out & out slapstick (P.W.s making schnapps out of potato peelings and string, washing socks in a pot of watery soup, lining up at a homemade telescope to gawk at Russian women prisoners taking delousing showers).
Unburdened with any particular sense of the realistic or humane, Stalag 17 is a heartless jape that manages to be both lively and amusing. The sardonic talents of Producer-Director-Co-Scenarist Billy (Sunset Boulevard) Wilder are well tuned to these rather ghoulish goings on. Taking the action out of the barrack confines and into the barbed-wire compound at intervals, he has 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.
Fast Company (MGM) is a romantic comedy about a horse that conies in a winner only when the jockey sings to it. Also figuring in the cast: a wealthy racehorse owner (Nina Foch) and an aspiring actress (Polly Bergen) with a one-horse stable, both of whom are pursuing a handsome trainer (Howard Keel). With its strained horseplay and plodding screenplay. Fast Company is strictly an also-ran.
The Desert Rats (20th Century-Fox) is a sort of sequel, made by the same studio, to the 1951 movie The Desert Fox, which was criticized in some quarters for glorifying the German Afrika Korps' Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. The new picture is in the nature of an answer to these criticisms. Rommel is again played by James Mason, but the Desert Fox has undergone a change of dramatic color: no longer a generous desert fighter, he is now an arrogant and not very likable character.* The Desert Fox focused on the battle of El Alamein, but The Desert Rats flashes back some 18 months to depict the 1941 siege of Tobruk, where the Nazi blitzkrieg was stopped for the first time. Against this factual background, the scenarists have set a fictional plot about a tough British captain (Richard Burton) with a soft spot in his heart for his alcoholic old ex-schoolteacher (Robert Newton), a private with the Australian 9th Division.
The Desert Rats is at its best when it ditches its contrived plot and concentrates on hard-hitting scenes of desert warfare pieced out with real newsreel shots (e.g., a Commando raid on a Nazi ammunition dump, Rommel's tanks attacking under cover of a sandstorm). Unusual linguistic touch: Actor Mason, who spoke flawless English as Rommel in The Desert Fox, this time affects a rich Teutonic accent.