The Captive Heart (1946) - film review

In August 1940, a German prisoner-of-war camp receives a fresh intake of captured British soldiers.  These include Captain Hasek, a Czech soldier who, after escaping from a Nazi concentration camp, stole the uniform and papers from a dead British soldier named Captain Mitchell.   The other soldiers grow suspicious of Hasek because of his ability to speak German fluently but the Czech wins them around and convinces them that if his true identity is discovered he will be executed by the Nazis.  To prevent his captors from becoming suspicious, Hasek begins corresponding with Mitchell’s wife and unwittingly rekindles her love for her husband...

Ealing Studio’s Went the Day Well? (1943) is widely considered to be one of the best British war films, but another war film from the same company, The Captive Heart, is just as deserving of praise and attention.  This was one of the first films to portray life in the prisoner-of-war camps and is a forerunner to films such as The Colditz Story (1955) and The Great Escape (1963).  The film pays tribute to those men who spent the war years not on the battlefields, winning honours and actively serving their country, but living in deplorable prison camps, cut off from the rest of the world and not knowing which way the war was going.

The Captive Heart is a beautifully crafted film that combines some strikingly evocative chiaroscuro cinematography with an almost documentary-style naturalism (achieved by using a real German prisoner-of-war camp as the principal location).  Excellent performances from an ensemble cast of some of Britain’s finest character actors of the period (including Jack Warner, who cited this as his favourite film role) and a realistic story vividly convey how life was in the camps, perhaps more so than any subsequent film of this kind.  Some forced sentimentality creeps in towards the end, but this is not enough to diminish the poignancy and authenticity of what is, by  any criterion, a remarkable film.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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