“I don't know about you, but it makes me sore seeing those war pictures about fIying Ieathernecks, and submarine patroIs, and frogmen, and gueriIIas in the PhiIippines. What gets me is that there never was a movie about P.O.W.s…about prisoners of war.” - Cookie
I’ve watched a lot of Christmas movies and, not surprisingly, there are a few that stand out as particularly atrocious.
The songs and story in The Nightmare Before Christmas are terrible (though I always liked it as a kid, I was obsessed with the animation). Elf is the Pravda of neo-gingerbread propaganda (thanks to Ben Camino for that term) and I genuinely hate the experience of watching it; I think the romance between Jovie and Buddy is disconcerting and the ham-fistedness of the whole thing feels lazy, cheap, and embarrassing. The Polar Express is a charming book, but the movie is unwatchable - repetitive, boring music; creepy animation; a contrived story; and, for some reason, Steven Tyler.
There are some good ones, though. Home Alone, Christmas Vacation, Holiday Inn, Charlie Brown, Rudolph. However, my favorite Christmas movie is Stalag 17, and, ironically, it isn’t really a Christmas movie; it’s an Advent movie, a dark comedy filmed in 1953 about prisoners in a German World War II POW camp.
“Stalag” is German for prison camp, so the movie says, and the men of Stalag 17 live in Advent. Literally - the movie is set a week before Christmas in 1944 - and figuratively - the men do a lot of waiting. Waiting for the war to end. Waiting for letters from home. Waiting for Red Cross packages. Waiting in line at the barrack telescope to peer at the Russian women in the adjacent camp standing in line for the showers. There’s even a prisoner who has to wait in a water tank, holding onto a ladder, in freezing cold water up to his waist (I won’t tell you what he’s waiting for). They create little games and distractions to help with the waiting. They do what they can to reclaim some of their old lives and routines. Sometimes this means a little bit of smuggling, stashing and hiding contraband in the lofts and bunks and floorboards of the barrack. Early in the film, the men huddle around an illegal radio and listen to news reports about the war, “C’mon, Patton!” Come on, war. Get over with already.
The Krauts - er, sorry, just finished watching the movie - ahem - the Germans plant a spy in with the men and that’s the big plot point of the movie. Who’s the spy? Who keeps tipping off the guards? Who told the guards about the radio? Who told the guards about the trap door under the stove? The escape tunnel? And, most importantly, who told the Germans about Manfredi and Jonson’s escape attempt? Who got them killed?
Sgt. J. J. Sefton is a shrewd, hard to like character, always looking out for himself. He stashes cigarettes and other valuables and trades with the prison guards. He’s also the only hope of uncovering the German spy and solving the mystery. Ironically, the rest of the barrack thinks he’s the stoolie, and when things are at their lowest, they pin him down and beat him up after they see him walking past the gate and into the camp with all the Russian ladies (figuring it was a privilege he got for talking to the Germans).
Stalag 17 is an Ironic Advent Meditation and Sefton is the hope we’ve been waiting for, only we didn’t know it. In a place like that, in a prison camp, we need a little irony to make sense of it all, to stomach it. In a place like that, hope doesn’t always look the way we expect. Hope, in Stalag 17, looks suspicious. Hope is in it for the money. Hope gets bruised and bloodied. Hope has got a match and a cigar and knows how to play the odds. Hope doesn’t dress up in green tights and sing Christmas songs and act like a prepubescent boy that somehow hooks up with Zoey Deschanel. Maybe you came to blows with hope thinking it was a German spy or maybe you didn’t like the way it talked to you. Still, when it’s all said and done, hope is what put those wire cutters to the fence and busted you out of the camp.
The men manage to smuggle in a Charlie Brown-esque Christmas tree and a phonograph that plays "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," and it's at this moment, with victory music in the air and the men marching and dancing through the barrack, that the spy is finally revealed to the audience (but not to the men). It's a brilliant, eerie, and ironic scene (note, that link takes you to the big reveal, so if you want to watch the movie in its entirety, don't click it).
We know what the "spirit of Christmas" feels like, with all the lights and decorations and presents, the cookies and trees, the red and green and gold and silver, family and friends. It's good. But if you've ever wondered what the "spirit of Advent" feels like, here it is, wearing a smirk, in this black and white film about a German POW camp. Stalag 17 goes digging for irony in the mud and snow of the winter of '44 and finds it.
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