September, 1951: Gets to play Marvin W. 'Canarsie' Mikowsky part of Uncle Sam's Underwater Commandos The Frogmen, a classic war film that was nominated for two Oscars.
1952: A minor role in Finders Keepers followed. Then Harvey played Al in Just Across the Street a modest comedy with a clever
mistaken-identity romantic plot.
October, Harvey is the new Joe, the one who is always "figgerin" how he and Willie can get out of doing a day's work in Willie and Joe are Back at the Front. Cartoonist Bill Maudlin's foot soldiers returned to make the present emergency seem less worrisome than it really was.
Tom Ewell returned to play deadpan Willie. Here he went back to basic training with as much enthusiasm as a boy at school. There was something genuinely sympathetic about the two main characters being woeful victims of war.
This time the boys concentrated their fighting efforts in Tokyo, where they were sent double quick. They didn't actually spend much time at the front but they proved just as difficult when volunteering for "special assignments" - as these tasks turned out to be the most back breaking, thankless tasks in the army --- the testing of new equipment. This got them a seven day leave which started off "off limits" in a Japanese bath house run by geisha girls. A couple of other incidents involved a ring of hijackers which all-in-all made Willie and Joe a couple of unsung war heroes!!
January 1953: Harvey finally gets to play the lead role in a movie. That film was called Girls in the Night the story of a young would-be hood, Chuck Haynes (Harvey) who is wrongly accused of robbery.
August saw Harvey reprise his stage role as Harry Shapiro in the new, Billy Wilder directed movie, Stalag 17. Also reprising their stage
parts were Robert Strauss, Robert Shawley and William Pierson.
As acted by William Holden, Sergeant J.J. Sefton, the film's hero/heel emerged as the most memorable
character to come out of Hollywood in the year 1953. The movie also emerged as the finest comedy
drama of the year too. Tense and raucous most critics assigned this fast paced, sentimental movie to
a place on the top 5 films of the year.
Boys getting a good service
With Tom Ewell as Willie and Joe
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Watching and going wild as they see some Russian females!
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The GI's roar!
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In making Stalag 17 for Paramount, Director Billy Wilder preserved most of
the lines and situations of the original play --- whose authors Trzcinski and
Devan, were themselves prisoners of war. But Wilder added some touches of
his own. Like when he shows how two GIs capitalize on their nerve and their
guards' dull wits to paint their way right out of the camp and into the
forbidden female compound. This was done almost entirely without dialogue and
with an exact sense of timing, this incident exploited the ridiculous in a way that went right back to the great days of Chaplin and Keaton et al.
Director Billy Wilder would go on to make some of the industries finest ever movies;
1955: The Seven Year Itch - 1959: Some Like it Hot - 1960: The Apartment
1963: Irma la Douce
William Holden won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Stalag 17.
Harvey himself, earned the Theater Owners of America's Laurel Award for outstanding comedy performance and best possibility for stardom
Director Billy Wilder
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