FILM 1455: STALAG 17

TRIVIA: William Holden did not like the part of Sefton at all as written in the script, thinking him too selfish. He kept asking Billy Wilder to make Sefton nicer and Wilder refused. Holden actually refused the role but was forced to do it by the studio.

To improve the chances for commercial success in West Germany (at that time already an important market for Hollywood) a Paramount executive suggested to Billy Wilder that he should make the camp guards Poles rather than Germans. Wilder, whose mother and stepfather had died in the concentration camps, furiously refused and demanded an apology from the executive. When it didn't come, Wilder did not extend his contract at Paramount

Otto Preminger always claimed that, as a director, he would only shout at actors if they were late or if they did not know their lines. Employed solely as an actor in this film, he told Billy Wilder at the start of filming that if he ever forgot his lines, he would present Wilder with a jar of caviar. Wilder later told interviewers that he soon had dozens of such jars.

William Holden's acceptance speech for Best Actor was the shortest in Academy history up until that time. He said only two words: "Thank You." Holden hadn't meant to be so brief, but the televised TV broadcast of the Academy Awards ceremony was running long, and was about to be cut off the air. Holden later took out an ad in the Hollywood trade publications thanking the people he had intended to thank in his speech. The briefness of Holden's speech was later surpassed by Alfred Hitchcock (who accepted his Irving Thalberg Award in 1967 with a simple "Thanks.") and by John Mills, who after playing a mute character in Ryan's Daughter (1970), accepted his 1971 Best Supporting Actor award with a simple smile and a thankful nod of the head.

According to the Virgin Film Guide, Otto Preminger's POW Camp Commandant character Colonel von Scherbach in this film is reminiscent of Erich von Stroheim's similar character, prison camp commandant Captain von Rauffenstein in Jean Renoir's, La Grande Illusion (1937). Although Preminger played a Nazi officer, in real life he was Jewish, as was Erich von Stroheim.

Normally the German military assigned staff officers to command oflags (prison camps for enemy officers), while captains, or the equivalent outside the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, commanded stalags for enlisted enemy soldiers. It was quite unusual, therefore, for Stalag 17 to have been commanded by a colonel such as Von Scherbach.

FILM 1231: THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI

TRIVIA: Colonel Saito was inspired by Major Risaburo Saito, who unlike the character portrayed in the film was said by some to be one of the most reasonable and humane of all of the Japanese officers, usually willing to negotiate with the POWs in return for their labor. Such was the respect between Saito and Lieutenant-Colonel Toosey (a substitute Nicholson) that Toosey spoke up on Saito's behalf at the war-crimes tribunal after the war, saving him from the gallows. Ten years after Toosey's 1975 death, Saito made a pilgrimage to England to visit his grave.

During shooting, Alec Guinness continued to have doubts about his performance and the direction he was getting from David Lean. To put Guinness at ease, Lean decided to show the actor a rough cut of certain sequences. One night, Lean ran over an hour's worth of footage for Guinness with the actor's wife and son also attending. During the screening, nothing was said. At the end, the Guinness family thanked Lean and promptly walked out, leaving the director without a clue as to what to think of their reaction (or lack of). Later that night, Lean received a visit from his lead actor who told him that he and his family had decided that Nicholson was the best thing that Guinness had ever done.

For the scenes where William Holden, Jack Hawkins, Geoffrey Horne and the native girls had to wade through swamps, they were wading through specially created ones. The real swamps in Ceylon were deemed to be too dangerous. Nevertheless, the leeches in the recreated swamps were real.

There were no facilities on the island of Ceylon to process film rushes so the day's filming had to be flown to London to be processed and then flown back out to Ceylon.

Laurence Olivier was offered the part of Colonel Nicholson but turned it down in order to direct The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) instead. In retrospect, Olivier said that it was a sensible decision to go off and do love scenes with Marilyn Monroe rather than tough it out in the jungles of Ceylon with David Lean.

When the film was first released in theaters, Alec Guinness's name was misspelled in the opening credits, using only one 'n' in his surname. The error has since been corrected.

Howard Hawks was asked to direct, but declined. After the box-office failure of Land of the Pharaohs (1955), he didn't want a second one in a row, and he thought the critics would love this movie but the public would stay away. One particular concern was the all-male lead roles.