The Password Is Courage

Plot

Charles Coward (Dirk Bogarde) is a senior British NCO incarcerated in the POW camp Stalag VIII-B. He encourages his fellow inmates to escape, and tries to humiliate the German guards at every opportunity.

Coward first attempts to escape by masquerading as a wounded German soldier. He is taken to hospital, where his identity is revealed, but not before being awarded the Iron Cross as he lies in his hospital bed. He then digs a tunnel, and, using a map he obtains from an attractive Polish resistance contact (Maria Perschy), escapes with fellow prisoner Bill Pope (Alfred Lynch). They are captured at a railway station.

After the failure of that escape, they then manage to escape again by masquerading as workmen clearing rubble in a rural area. After learning that the American front line is only a mile away, they steal an unattended fire engine to get past the German soldiers in between. Their plan works - a German troop convoy on the road moves aside to allow them to speed past to get to a non-existent fire - and they drive off to freedom.

Cast

Cast notes:

Production

The Password Is Courage is based on John Castles biography of Sergeant-Major Charles Coward. Coward has a cameo appearance in the film during a party scene, and also served as technical advisor during the filming, shot entirely in England.

The film raised some debate amongst ex-prisoners of war. There are no known survivors of any of Cowards escapes and the National Ex-Prisoner of War Association in their Autumn 2006 newsletter, has suggested that some of the stories in his biography might have happened to other men in the camps, with some events "borrowed" for the book and, subsequently, for the film. Shimon Peres, President of Israel, also disclosed that his father, Yitzchak Perski, who immigrated from Poland to Mandatory Palestine in 1932, had joined the British Army in 1939 and was captured by the Germans at Greece in 1941. He had been a fellow prisoner of Coward. He further claimed that some of the films episodes are based on his fathers real-life exploits.

The original cinema version of The Password Is Courage had a sequence set in Auschwitz concentration camp, illustrated by drawings. This sequence is cut from the version shown on television broadcasts, but the credit for the drawings remains in the credits list at the end of the film.

Reception

The Password is Courage received mixed reviews from critics as the true life story of a prisoner of war done in a jocular vein was considered inauthentic. The review in Variety noted: "Andrew L. Stone’s screenplay, based on a biog of Sergeant-Major Charles Coward by John Castle, has pumped into its untidy 116 minutes an overdose of slapstick humour. Result is that what could have been a telling tribute to a character of guts and initiative, the kind that every war produces, lacks conviction.".