Stalag 17 (1953), dir. Billy Wilder. Streaming at Home, Sunday, November 20.

For a lack of movies to agree upon, we settled on the very routine classic, Stalag 17. We were both surprised at the extent to which this is a Christmas movie. It is! Gifts are exchanged, there’s a tree, singing and dancing, extra snacks for the prisoners. So there you go.

Stalag 17 is visually too committed to the stage production from which it was adapted. It has a narrator that is totally unnecessary (actually, that character could be removed entirely) and William Holden was nearly disgusted that he won–he thought Burt Lancaster deserved it for From Here to Eternity, which is true (Holden thought he also deserved it for better performances he’d done in the past–also true.)

Like Christmas in Connecticut, this is a movie that totally softens a wartime experience. I guess one of the scriptwriters, or the authors of the play, were in Stalag 17, and it’s amazing there was a time, so close to this immense tragedy, where they could make a movie like this. I mean, its great inspiration is Hogan’s Heroes. Ouch.