Stalag 17 (1953)
Directed by Billy Wilder
After two American prisoners are killed by guards in the act of escaping from a German POW camp in World War II, barracks black marketeer J.J. Sefton is suspected of being an informer.
13 connections found
View:
13 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Stalag 17 to
No one who remembers "Stalag 17" will have to guess at the number that's on the front of the hen house, and no veteran of "The Great Escape" will fail to recognize the contours of the farm, complete with barbed wire fencing, barking dogs, and a suspicious Mr. Tweedy checking the locks and muttering about what the chickens are up to.
The kids, for example, probably won't catch the "Stalag 17" references, or "The Great Escape" music during the opening sequence, but they'll love the slapstick antics and tangible animation of the clay heroes.
In fact, the whole structure of the film is drawn from classic World War II prison pictures such as Stalag 17 and The Great Escape; just as the Wallace and Gromit shorts drew on thriller-movie conventions, and indeed as other animated films from The Lion King to A Bug’s Life have traditional structures taken from earlier films.
Most are comparing the film to a spin on the POW pictures of the past, like "The Great Escape" and "Stalag 17," but striking me as more of a chicken-based variation on the Holocaust, "Chicken Run" is set at Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy's England-based farm, and centers on the poultry inhabitants who are constantly making attempts to escape the fenced-in, barbed-wired confinement that they have been restricted to.
Tossed into a dead-end job market, without any real prospects, they talk their way into an internship on the sprawling, buzzy Silicon Valley campus of Google, where they’re pitted against a bunch of brainiac 20-year-olds who live and breathe technology and don’t get any of the pair’s pathetically ancient pop-culture references (Stalag 17, anyone?).
Unlike the raunchy Wedding Crashers, it's rated PG-13 instead of R, it avoids the strain of mean-spiritedness that's in vogue in modern comedy, and its leads are now more comfortable making jokes about 1953's Stalag 17 and 1983's Flashdance than anything from the brave new world of 2013.
The best Billy offers as rejoinders are “Stalag 17” and “Flashdance” quips, and his reaction to a real-life Golden Snitch in a Quidditch game is amusingly dumbfounded.
The indolent script labors all over the place in the way it owes its nod to countless other flicks ranging from Redford's own "Brubaker" to "Stalag 17".
While this is a pretty standard prison drama plot structure ("Stalag 17," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," etc.), it eventually changes to a war game plot.
It becomes a straight-up prison-camp escape picture -- modeled very consciously on classic films like "Stalag 17," "The Great Escape" and "Cool Hand Luke," right down to the music -- with the evil warden taking the form of a good-ol'-boy stuffed animal named Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear (voiced to perfection by Ned Beatty).
The movie nimbly alludes to prison-escape films — "Stalag 17," "The Great Escape" — but it also mimics the tropes of those movies and all sorts of action pictures, making "Toy Story 3" often ordinary and, at its lowest, ho-hum.
Advertisement
There's a theatrical quality to the writing here, from the prisoners' communal emotion (reminiscent of, say, Stalag 17) to the rich actor's duet played by Newman and Jo Van Fleet as his visiting, dying mother.
This segment has been influenced by and serves as an homage to classics like The Great Escape and Stalag 17.
Harrelson is bald, like another commandant played by Otto Preminger in “Stalag 17,” another classic of the prison of war escape genre, but the actor capable of a wide range of performances essentially is allowed one note here, snarling a lot.
Unlike the raunchy Wedding Crashers, it's rated PG-13 instead of R, it avoids the strain of mean-spiritedness that's in vogue in modern comedy, and its leads are now more comfortable making jokes about 1953's Stalag 17 and 1983's Flashdance than anything from the brave new world of 2013.
Advertisement
Damien Chazelle’s film — giddily crafted, improbably enthralling — is a cross between The Red Shoes and Stalag 17 .
Judging from the previews, and knowing Tarantino´s sense of style, I figured we´d get a film close to "Kelly´s Heroes," "The Great Escape," or "Stalag 17." Granted, he may have stolen bits and pieces of that technique, but in no way does it come close to those great films.