‘Who’s the grass?’ is the underlying theme of this Friday’s movie offering.

Stalag 17, starring William Holden, and a very young-looking Peter Graves later famous for his role as the pilot in the comedy Airplane, is a thriller set in a German prisoner of war camp during the Second World War.

Stalag 17 is a prison camp holding Allied sergeants captured either during ground fighting or who were pilots who had been shot down by the German military.  The men in the camp while away their time planning escape attempts and engaging in board games and petty trading activities.

One particular hut in the camp is considered an unlucky hut.  Every escape attempt from there is thwarted, every clandestine article is discovered and things become so bad that men from other huts consider those living in it to be jinxed.

The German guards seem to have an uncanny ability to kill those members of this particular hut who attempt to escape or find forbidden items.  Eventually the prisoners from the hut in question come to the conclusion that someone is grassing to the Germans, but the question is who is it and will the angry prisoners come to the right conclusion as to who is tipping off the guards.

This film, directed by Billy Wilder and made in 1959 grips from beginning to end.  It’s not all unrelenting prison camp gloom though as there are lighter moments and lighter characters such as the drunken fool ‘Animal’ who is a bit too obsessed with the film star Betty Grable.

I hope you enjoy this film because I did and watch out for the big surprise towards the end, I won’t give any spoilers because the ‘reveal’ of the grass is very surprising.