296 STALAG 17
Plot Summary
Voice- over narration by Sgt. Clarence Harvey “Cookie” Cook (Gil Stratton, Jr.) sets
the scene. It is the week before Christmas 1944 in the small American compound
of a Luftwaffe POW camp near the Danube that holds about 630 gunners, radio-
men, and flight engineers— all sergeants— from shot- down United States Army Air
Forces (USAAF) bombers. As Manfredi (Michael Moore) and Johnson (Peter Bald-
win) attempt to escape through a hidden tunnel, Sgt. J. J. Sefton (William Holden)
bets the other 72 inmates of Baracke 4 a large quantity of cigarettes that the two
escapees won’t make it out of the forest. Sefton wins his bet; the pair is shot by
waiting guards. The other prisoners conclude that an in for mant in their midst must
have tipped off the Germans. Suspicion naturally falls on Sefton, an enterprising
grifter who eschews all escape attempts as futile while devising vari ous schemes
to hustle his fellow Kriegies and bartering openly with the German guards for bet-
ter food and other creature comforts. After von Scherbach displays the bodies of
Manfredi and Johnson to the assembled POWs as an object lesson, routine daily
life at the camp is depicted in a series of vignettes. Baracke 4 guard, Feldwebel
Johann Sebastian Schulz (Sig Ruman), confiscates a clandestine radio in another
success for the “stoolie.” Sgt. Stanislaus “Animal” Kuzawa (Robert Straus) is obsessed
with Betty Grable and becomes despondent when he hears that Grable and HarryU.S. Army Air Force POWs Sgt. Stanislaus “Animal” Kuzawa (Robert Strauss, left),
Sgt. J. J. Sefton (William Holden, middle), and Sgt. Harry Shapiro (Harvey Lembeck,
right) peer through the barbed wire of their World War II prison camp in Billy Wilder’s
St a lag 17 (1953). (Paramount Home Video/Photofest)