Stalag 17 was a huge success with critics and audiences, earning $10 million within six months of its release in summer 1953; it was an even bigger hit in Europe.

Stalag 17 received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Supporting Actor (Robert Strauss). William Holden won for Best Actor.

Wilder was nominated for the Directors Guild of America Award, and he and Edwin Blum were nominated for their script by the Writers Guild of America.

"Raucous and tense, heartless and sentimental, always fast-paced, it has already been assigned by critics to places on their list of the year's ten best movies...As acted by William Holden, Stalag 17's hero-heel emerges as the most memorable character to come out in Hollywood this year." - Life magazine.

"Holden is magnificent as the heel-turned-hero, but Stalag 17 is full of wonderful, well-directed performances....Peppered with Wilder's distinctive biting wit..." TV Guide.

"Even the despairing range [Holden] demonstrated in Sunset Boulevard [1950] hadn't prepared audiences for the abrasive edge and distinctively male energy he showed in this role, which is rather like the parts that catapulted Bogart to a new level of stardom in the early 40s." - Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (Henry Holt and Co., 1982).

"Stalag 17, which I admire, is both a psychological and a comic film, but the comedy is far weaker than that "psychologogy" I've just disparaged. The latter is so unusual and subtle that I think it makes this Wilder's best film...The depravity of the group versus the individual's moral solitude, is this not a large theme? Are we not right to salute a movie that dares to depart from the exigencies of life that make the beggar an accomplice of the very order that he denounces, and shows us that the answers are in us and only in us?" - Francois Truffaut, The Films In My Life (Touchstone).

"Granddaddy of all WW2 POW films...Wilder brilliantly blends drama with comedy to show monotonous, anxiety-ridden life of POWs. Wonderful comic relief by Strauss and Lembeck (repeating their Broadway roles) plus superb turn by Preminger as Nazi camp commander." - Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide (Plume).

"High jinks, violence and mystery in a sharply calculated mixture; an atmosphere quite different from the understated British films on the subject." - Halliwell's Film & Video Guide (HarperPerrenial).

"A lusty comedy melodrama, loaded with bold, masculine humor and as much of the original's uninhibited earthiness as good taste and the Production Code permit...Otto Preminger is the third star, playing the camp commander, with obvious relish for its colorful cruelty." - Variety Movie Guide (Prentice Hall).

"Seamless comedy-drama with realistic squalor and squabbling in the daddy of World War 2 prison camp movies. Mischievous wit Wilder subverted the genre with a bitter, cynical anti-hero (Holden, who won the Oscar® as Sefton, who is closest, of all Wilder's characters, to his alter ego)...This is one of Wilder's own favorites." - The Rough Guide to Cult Movies (Penguin).

"Picture stumbles along at the beginning, as we try to adjust to the rowdy comedy that plays a major part in the film (these men need laughter in their lives), but it really gets exciting once we viewers are let in on the spy's identity. The "Johnny Comes Marching Home" sequence is quite powerful. We can't wait till Holden traps the culprit." - Danny Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic (Fireside).

"Billy Wilder's highly honored adaptation of the play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski really does not live up to its reputation. It's less a realistic look at life inside a German prison camp than an improbable suspense tale that depends on some clumsy contrivances. Worse yet, the moments of comic relief are appalling...Stalag 17 is really more a Cold War film than a World War II film. Its questions about informants, loyalty, and the tyranny of the group over the individual are concerns of the 1950s, not the 1940s." - Mike Mayo, War Movies (Visible Ink).

Compiled by Rob Nixon & Jeff Stafford