The Password Is Courage

I mentioned at the beginning of the month that the Dirk Bogarde film The Password Is Courage was getting two airings in September: one as part of the Bogarde tribute, and a second as part of a night of World War II prison break movies. That second airing is overnight tonight at 3:15 AM (or early tomorrow in all of the continental US).

Loosely based on a real-life person, that person is Sgt. Maj. Charles Coward (obviously, played by Bogarde). Coward had been captured by the Germans while the British were trying to get their troops out of France before Dunkirk in the spring of 1940, and with a bunch of other soldiers sent to one or another of the POW camps that the Nazis had set up. Of course, like all good officers, Coward has a duty to try to escape, and his first escape is in France, where, at least in the movie, he's mistaken for a German officer and awarded the Iron Cross!

For this, Coward gets sent to Stalag VIII-B, a POW camp in what is now southern Poland, although at the time it was the very eastern portions of Germany. Coward continues his escape attempts, bribing Nazi guards for the materials necessary to build a giant tunnel out of the camp and on to the Czech protectorate, and hopefully to freedom somewhere. The POWs are used to do work details, and this along with more bribes enables Coward to get out and go to the nearby village, where he meets up with optometrist Irena (Maria Perschy), who is a member of the Underground. In the movie, Coward and Irena fall in love, although this is one of the many things in the movie that did not happen in real life.

Eventually, it comes time for the escape, although one of the things making it more difficult is the fact that most of the prisoners speak no German. At least some of them speak languages of one or another Nazi-occupied country, especially French, which enables them to fake work permits claiming these folks are from France. But not being able to speak German is still a real problem, especially for Coward. And not that any of the men in the POW camp could have known it, but their escape was planned for a date only a few months before the camps were liberated.

To be honest, there's not all that much to the plot of The Password is Courage; it could easily be summed up as "soldiers get captured and constantly try to break out of POW camp". That having been said, for the genre it's pretty well done. If it's not well known today, that I think is down to the fact that it was made by MGM's British unit with Dirk Bogarde being the only really well known name, and even he wasn't that big a star here in the States. And with a looming trend toward bigger war movies with action and color photography, it's no wonder The Password Is Courage fell by the wayside.

It also doesn't help to look up Charles Coward, as doing so turns the movie from a well-made example of a genre into something formulaic that ignore's a much more interesting true story. The work camp where Coward was sent was not far from Auschwitz, and the real-life Coward spoke German, which made him useful as a liaison between the German authorities and the soldiers and Red Cross. Coward got himself smuggled into Auschwitz, and used the papers and effects of dead soldiers and laborers to smuggle Jews out of Auschwitz. That, rather than a straightforward attempted escape story, seems like it would be for more worthy of a movie, although I suppose in the early 1960s that wouldn't have been considered commercial enough.