Daily Dialogue — December 6, 2011

“I don’t know about you, but it always makes me sore when I see those war pictures… all about flying leathernecks and submarine patrols and frogmen and guerillas in the Philippines. What gets me is that there never w-was a movie about POWs — about prisoners of war. Now, my name is Clarence Harvey Cook: they call me Cookie. I was shot down over Magdeborg, Germany, back in ’43; that’s why I stammer a little once in a while, ‘specially when I get excited. I spent two and a half years in Stalag 17. “Stalag” is the German word for prison camp, and number 17 was somewhere on the Danube. There were about 40,000 POWs there, if you bothered to count the Russians, and the Poles, and the Czechs. In our compound there were about 630 of us, all American airmen: radio operators, gunners, and engineers. All sergeants. Now you put 630 sergeants together and, oh mother, you’ve got yourself a situation. There was more fireworks shooting off around that joint… take for instance the story about the spy we had in our barracks…”

— Cookie (Gil Stratton), Stalag 17 (1953), screenplay by Billy Wilder and Edwin Blum, based on a play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is World War II, suggested by Phil who also suggested Stalag 17.

Trivia: 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, accepted his 1971 Best Supporting Actor award with a simple smile and a thankful nod of the head.

Dialogue On Dialogue: Interesting how many of Wilder’s movies start with voiceover narration including this movie, Sunset Blvd., The Apartment. Are there others? 

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