There are a handful of movies that are set at Christmas time but whose plots are not ostensibly about the holiday season. The first Die Hard -- yes, kids, there is a reason why Bruce Willis keeps making these movies -- feature a terrorist attack on an office building where many of the employees are getting wasted at the Christmas party. It was great fun. Terry Gilliam's Brazil -- an overwhelmingly designed dystopian vision of bureaucratic totalitarianism -- also takes place around the holidays. Joe Dante's Gremlins gives us the most horrible Christmas story ever told, as Phoebe Cates explains what happened to her dad when he literally tried to be Santa. It also is directly responsible for the resurrection of Darlene Love's "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," as beautiful and heartbreaking a pop song about the holidays as has ever been written and recorded. (And every year, the season really begins when she makes her appearance singing it on Letterman, which she's done since 1986.)
But my favorite of these movies is the first one I ever saw, on the tube, before any of the above films had even been made: Billy Wilder's Stalag 17.
Adapted from a stage play (one of the playwrights appears in the film), Stalag 17 tells the story of American POWs in a German camp at Christmastime 1944. This is a rough crowd of a American airmen, all sergeants, used to yelling. But they also do their best to survive under the conditions which are muddy and cold, though no doubt sanitized to some degree by Paramount Pictures relative to the real thing. The men sneak a radio around the compound to try and get news about the war. They play cards and gamble on mice races. They also dig tunnels and try to escape.
When two men are caught outside the compound, the men begin to suspect that there's a stool pigeon in their barracks. Pretty quickly, the prime suspect is a man called Sefton, played by William Holden (who would win the Oscar for this role). In the underground economy of the POW camp, he's a sharp trader: he wheels and deals for the parts to make a distillery; he's the "commissioner" of the mice races; and he runs the "observatory": a makeshift telescope where the men can see as far as the Danube river -- or peep into the showers of the Russian women's prison compound. How does he pull this off? It's not just that he's trading sharper: he's willing to trade with the German guards to keep his operations afloat. He pays them essentially protection money to look the other way, and also will trade cigarettes for better food and bedding. (In one great scene, the entire barracks watches him fry a fresh egg on the stove.) Most outrageously, he bribes the guards into letting him go to the Russian women's compound for an evening of partying.
The rest of the men are digusted by Sefton; when the Germans force the men to fill in the escape tunnel, confiscate the radio, and even find out about a new arrival's act of sabotage, they believe that Sefton isn't just giving the guards cigarettes, but information.
Despite the seriousness of the situation, the film is also very funny, in Wilder's famously sardonic way. Two clown figures who also try to fool the guards are played by actors who did the original play: Harvey Lembeck and Robert Strauss, as Harry Shaprio and Stanislaus "The Animal" Gusava. They are brilliantly funny but also pull off moments of pathos, as when Harry gets letters from the finance company, telling him they are collecting his car back home, or when Animal, in his drunken state, thinks that Harry is Betty Grable, dances with her, and discovers that it's just Harry.
Needless to say, Sefton is not the stoolie, but I won't tell you who it is. Wilder paces the slow revelations of the real rat -- actually a German spy posing as an American -- perfectly. (Pay attention to the light bulb cord over the chessboard!) Sefton's exposure of the real informer is a great denouement, leading to one more desperate escape attempt.
Wilder's script is first-rate, alternately sharp and poignant. (One man reads a letter from his wife, who tells him that "you won't believe it but" a baby was dropped on her doorstep who looks just like he; as he keeps repeating, I believe it, I believe it, the painful truth sinks in about the baby and his wife.) The acting is top stuff; Otto Preminger is great as the Commandant of the camp. (He's got Wilder's favorite scene: the Colonel, with his boots off, is talking with the new prisoner, but as he does so he's preparing to take a phone call from his superiors... and so must put his boots on so that when he's on the phone he may click his heels in salutation!) There's a moving scene on Christmas Eve of the men signing "Silent Night," decorating their tiny Christmas tree with their dog tags. Despite the heroism of the end, Wilder undercuts this with a number of sardonic lines that I won't share with you so as not to spoil things. It's the first Wilder film I ever saw, and in many ways still my favorite.
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