294 STALAG 17
with considerable controversy in its home country. As Johan Swinnen writes, “Many
viewers in the Netherlands saw it [as] an insult to the efficiency of the Re sis tance,
the character of the Dutch, and the impact the Dutch made as a whole on the out-
come of the War... [It] also suggests that the Re sis tance’s activities were little more
than diversions to keep the Germans from focusing their entire efforts on the
War.” Swinnen further notes that the film “did not shy away from nudity and
sexuality,” another ele ment that met with disapproval in some quarters (Mathijs,
2004, p. 147). Released in the United States on 16 August 1979, Soldier of Orange
won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Foreign Film in 1979.
A year later it received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
Not personally invested in the history it invoked, American film audiences and
critics tended to regard the film as an engrossing war epic, though not without
some obvious flaws. Janet Maslin’s review is typical: “Soldier of Orange may not
be great art but it’s a good yarn. And the combined effects of Mr. Verhoeven’s
comfortingly old- fashioned storytelling and Mr. Hauer’s unexpectedly brittle
per for mance keep it moving at a fast clip.” But Maslin also remarked on the film’s
two main En glish characters, “an officer (Edward Fox) and his trampy, ridicu lous
assistant (Susan Penhaligon), are so weirdly caricatured that they may make a
great comic impression on American viewers” (Maslin, 1979). In a 1999 election
for best Dutch film of the 20th century at the Netherlands Film Festival, Soldier of
Orange was voted second greatest, right after another Paul Verhoeven film, Turk-
ish Delight (1973).Reel History Versus Real History
Though names have been changed, Soldier of Orange is a faithful distillation of its
source material. However, in an interview when Black Book, his fourth film about
the Dutch Re sis tance, appeared in 2006, Paul Verhoeven admitted that he needed
to embellish the facts of Erik Lanshof’s adventure to make it “more heroic and
patriotic... And these events were embellished to begin with. Embellishment is
unavoidable when you’re turning actual events into a film.” Verhoeven and Gerard
Soeteman discovered “darker and shadowy material” about the Re sis tance during
their research for Soldier of Orange but suppressed it until Black Book, almost 30 years
later: “That the Dutch underground was marbled with anti- Semitism, that some
high- ranking Nazis knew they were trapped in a matrix of insanity, that war can
be fun, that liberation can be terrible, that revenge against Nazi collaborators can
unleash new forms of ugliness no less horrific than Nazism itself” (Koehler, n.d.).
As an exercise in conventional heroic storytelling, Soldier of Orange had to avoid
such ambiguities.Stalag 17 (1953)
Synopsis
St a lag 17 is an American war film produced and directed by Billy Wilder. Adapted
from a Broadway play, starring William Holden and featuring Robert Strauss,