Stalag 17: Blood in the mud (and a few laughs too)

A lot of new movies get shit on for having a wayward tone that is all over the place, because apparently modern audiences can only handle one thing at a time, but plenty of classic films show that you don't have to be so monotone, even if they come in black and white.

Take Billy Wilder's Stalag 17, which tells the tale of a group of American POWs in a Nazi prisoner of war camp. It sometimes gets a bit Hogan Heroes - there's even a comedy German sergeant called Schulz - but it also has two men brutally machine-gunned down in the opening minutes, with their bodies left to rot in the mud.

And it carries on like that, all the way though, with silly pranks and prisoners trying to get glimpses of Russian women smashing up against a mob mentality that almost costs the life of William Holden's character, who is a little shady, but not an obvious traitor. The stakes remain extremely life or death, right to the end.

Yet it still feels like a complete piece, not a patchwork of different angles and perspectives. It might take a master like Wilder to show that you can be all over the place without losing focus, but at least he shows it can be done.