Film - Philip Kerr finds there's no escaping cliches in a new POW movie
I've been thinking about Billy Wilder, who died at the end of March aged 95, and recalling a conversation I once had with him about why he was selling his art collection. Dismissing the idea that he might be short of money, Wilder confessed that the real reason he was putting it up for auction was so that he could hang a second, secret art collection, then languishing in a vault, which his wife knew nothing about. His chuckling explanation seemed rather typical of a man who, as a writer-director, always seemed drawn to the idea of secret lives and masks. The character of Sefton in Stalag 17 is the closest thing to an alter ego that Wilder ever put on celluloid. William Holden won an Oscar for the role of the laconic loner and wheeler-dealer whose pragmatism and unfettered capitalism put him at odds with his fellow American POWs. Like Sefton, Wilder, who escaped the Holocaust, was a survivor.
Stalag 17 is one of my favourite POW movies. Just as it was influenced by Jean Renoir's masterpiece La Grande Illusion, so, in turn, the blackly comic turns that peopled Wilder's film (Harvey Lembeck, Robert Strauss and Otto Preminger) influenced those American POW movies that came after it. King Rat looks like nothing less than a crib from Wilder's earlier picture; and Stalag 17 was even the sire of a long-running American TV series set in a POW camp, Hogan's Heroes. Four years after Stalag 17, and playing more or less the same character as Sefton, Holden went on to star in a much more grandiose picture about a POW camp, The Bridge on the River Kwai, directed by David Lean.
Before Kwai, British POW movies (The Wooden Horse, Albert RN, The Colditz Story) all looked like marginally more grown-up versions of Tom Brown's Schooldays. Equally, before the subversive Stalag 17, American POW movies (The Purple Heart, Prisoner of War) were relentlessly sombre affairs. And it was not until 1963, with The Great Escape, that the two varieties of the genre were successfully cross-bred.
The past is a foreign country; Wilder, and Lean, did things differently there. Wilder based his screenplay for Stalag 17 on a Broadway play, which meant that, with the exception of the Germans - someone whose mother was murdered by the Germans at Auschwitz can be forgiven for making the Krauts in his movie look like stereotypical squareheads - the characters all worked because they'd come to life in the play.
With Hart's War, a modern studio movie about a POW camp, character, structure and dialogue all play second fiddle to the action and the heroic nobility of the star - the star in this case being Bruce Willis, an actor whose facial minimalism, reminiscent of Mount Rushmore, leads me to suspect that he is either Hollywood's latest Botox victim, or someone who is apparently so suspicious of the camera that he believes it might even steal his soul. Willis plays Colonel McNamara, the SAO (senior American officer) at the camp, with less expression than you can observe on the face of the average goalkeeper in a game of ice hockey. If ever a film is made about Archie Andrews, the narrow-eyed Willis looks like the ideal man for the role.
Archer and Scott, two black US air force pilots, arrive in Stalag VIA, in Germany, and immediately are subjected to the racism of this film's Sefton figure, a staff sergeant named Bedford (Cole Hauser). When Bedford is found murdered, suspicion falls on Scott (Terrence Howard), and before you can say "for you the war is over" - incredibly, one of the German guards does say this - a court martial is convened, with Scott facing a possible death sentence that the Germans, doubtless still smarting from the victory of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympiad, seem only too keen to execute.
It's about here that the movie starts to look and sound like a village-hall production of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. A spineless lieutenant named Hart (Colin Farrell) is appointed to defend Scott, but he proves better able to defend his stitched-up client than anyone, least of all McNamara, had hoped or predicted. Because it's obvious from the outset, I'm not giving anything away when I tell you that, having seen The Great Escape on bank holiday television almost as many times as I have done, Colonel McNamara (whose Red Cross parcels seem to have included a variety of toupees and hair extensions, as well as the usual cigarettes and chocolate) is using the trial of Lieutenant Scott as a diversion for the Germans, in the same way that Richard Attenborough and the chaps in Stalag Luft III covered their own subterranean endeavours with a production of Pygmalion.
This being a star vehicle with an "issue", the whole thing takes itself far too seriously, with none of the subtleties that distinguished Wilder's picture. And about the only distinguishing feature of the film is Colonel Werner Visser, a German camp commandant (played by Marcel Iures) who is such a wonderful pantomime villain that I half expected his staff sergeant to be called Smee.
Hart's War (15) is released on 24 May at cinemas nationwide
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
