The Captive Heart

This is an excellent film based on the lives of prisoners in a British P.O.W. camp in Germany. It is not a record of adventure and mighty deeds but one of a dreary monotonous captivity borne with unquenchable belief in a dubious and far distant victory.

The story concerns Michael Redgrave, who as a Czech, while escaping from the Gestapo, impersonates a dead British officer. He is captured and is suspected by his fellow prisoners but proves his identity. To avoid suspicion of the authorities he writes to his impersonatee's wife and falls in love with her. He is repatriated and joins her. Other sub-themes of almost equal importance carry this story along.

The treatment is admirably restrained. It could have been spoiled by a display of lush sentimentality. A good beginning culminates with an ending that is quite effective but not entirely convincing. Apparently everybody lived happily ever after.

The camera flashes back continually from home life to prison camp, perhaps too well, for there is a constant sense of action—of something brewing. This is a fault. The story of the film takes place over a period of years, yet we do not fully get that atmosphere of dreariness that must have pervaded the camp at times. The same stodgy food, that same deadly monotony, those petty irritations which must at times have made life almost unbearable. Things were portrayed as happening just a little too easily—the right time, the right place for everything. The lighting was perhaps at fault in creating this atmosphere. Everything was too bright, too summery. Slightly less light with a correspondingly more somber background would have dampened this effect of apparent ease.

These slight defects, however, do not spoil what is otherwise a good film. It is worth seeing.