Trivia / Stalag 17

• Billing Displacement:
  • Cookie narrates the film and acts as something of a lancer for Sefton, yet Gil Stratton Jr. is billed near the bottom of the cast list... even under William Pierson (Marco the Mailman, who really only has three significant scenes).
  • Dunbar doesn't have too many scenes in the movie (though his sabotage of an ammunitions trains in Berlin is an important plot point) despite Don Taylor having second billing.
• Contractual Obligation Project: William Holden didn't want to do the film, but was forced to by Paramount.
• Creator Cameo: Edmund Trzcinski, the author of the original Broadway play, appears as the soldier whose wife "found" a doorstop baby.
• Enforced Method Acting: Billy Wilder filmed in sequence, as he wrote the script, and as a result the cast members were actually very suspicious of each other because none of them knew who the informer would turn out to be until the shoot was nearly over.
• Fake Nationality: Peter Graves, playing a German character who's a Fake American in-universe.
• Jews Playing Nazis: Otto Preminger plays Nazi POW camp commandant Colonel von Scherbach.
• The Other Marty: Cy Howard was originally cast as Harry Shapiro, but Billy Wilder fired him after a week and replaced him with Harvey Lembeck, who had played the role on Broadway.
• Playing Against Type: Richard Erdman usually played comedic roles, so Hoffy was the first time he played a serious character. Billy Wilder even told him he couldn't laugh (or even titter) at all in the movie, and as such, Hoffy is rarely seen cracking a smile. In fact, because of this, Erdman said he couldn't get another comedy part for years, because he was one of the only characters from this movie who wasn't funny.
• What Could Have Been: The role of Sefton was originally written with Charlton Heston in mind, but when the script was altered to make the character less heroic, he was dropped in favor of someone more suitable for the role. The next choice was Kirk Douglas, who turned it down, having been unimpressed with the stage version; he later cited this as one of the worst mistakes of his career.

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