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Richard Erdman

Stalag 17 (1953) starring William Holden, Otto Preminger

Stalag 17

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Stalag 17 (1953) starring William Holden, Otto Preminger

[Opening narration]

Cookie: 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 Magdeburg, 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… 

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Jumping Jacks

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Jumping Jacks (1952), starring Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis

In Jumping Jacks, Hap Smith (Jerry Lewis), nightclub entertainer, has a new act since his former partner Chick Allen (Dean Martin) joined the army: with lovely new partner Betsy Carter (Mona Freeman), Hap plays a clownish parody of a soldier. Meanwhile, Chick is organizing a soldier show at Fort Benning and finds he needs his old partner’s help. To get onto the base, Hap impersonates a hapless real soldier, Dogface Dolan (Richard Erdman); but circumstances force them to prolong the masquerade, creating an increasingly tangled Army-sized snafu.

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