A strange film. What kind of man is Sefton? He's out for what he can get, but in his defence, 'The first week I was in this joint, somebody stole my Red Cross Package, my blanket and my left shoe' - love the left shoe - writers take note. It's a tough and quite grim storyline mashed up with a broad comedy (Robert Strauss and Harvey Lembeck dancing together, the former thinking he's Betty Grable). It works, though, as the whole thing is underpinned by Billy's tough humour and his great construction and direction, as we slowly uncover who is the traitor in their midst.
William Holden, Don Taylor (the lieutenant), Otto Preminger, Richard Erdman, Peter Graves, Neville Brand (the one with the temper), Sig Ruman, Robinson Stone (the flute player).
Co-written with Edwin Blum, based on the play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski, from which several cast members repeated their roles. It was photographed by Ernest Laszlo and scored by Franz Waxman. Doane Harrison is the supervising editor, George Tomasini cut it. Paramount.
It's funny:
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| "One Führer is enough!" |
Kirk Douglas turned it down; Holden won the Oscar.
I was fascinated to learn (via 'Billy Wilder in Hollywood', Maurice Zolotow 1987) that Paramount wanted to release the film in Germany, and requested that the identity of the Nazi spy in their midst should be changed to that of a Polish POW who had sold out to the Nazis. Wilder wrote back expressing his outrage, talking of his background in Galicia (then Poland), the deaths of his family in Auschwitz and his support for the Polish Resistance, and demanding an apology. He didn't get one, so Billy severed his relationship with Paramount immediately (and drove through the studio gates for the last time in his Jaguar - love that detail).
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