The Password Is Courage

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

When is being transferred to Stalag VIII-B, the injured Coward escapes from a forced march, finding refuge in a French farmhouse and barn that is soon requisitioned by a German army unit setting up a field hospital. Believed to be a wounded German soldier, Coward is taken to a hospital, where his identity is discovered, but not before he is awarded the Iron Cross as he lies in his hospital bed.

Coward is sent on to Stalag VIII-B. On the way to the camp, he engineers the total destruction of an enemy ammunition train: He and his fellow prisoners toss flaming bundles of straw, set on fire with his cigarette lighter, into the passing cars.

At the camp he and his fellow prisoner Bill Pope (Alfred Lynch) become involved in ann elaborate escape plan. The Germans find a tunnel—but it is old and abandoned. Coward then attempts to deceive his camp commander and Luftwaffe officials, indicating that he has knowledge of a secret allied bomb sight. He receives special favours, which he uses to bribe guards to get vital materials needed for the coming escape.

When his ruse is discovered, Coward and his buddy Pope are transferred to a work camp in occupied Poland. The camp's commanding officer names Coward a traitor, hoping his fellow prisoners will kill him. The scheme fails.

The prisoners trick the Unteroffizier (Reginald Beckwith), into thinking he was responsible for a devastating fire that Coward actually engineered. Using this, Coward extracts an extraordinary privilege: being able to go to and from the neighbouring town without an escort. He makes contact with an attractive Polish resistance agent (Maria Perschy), who provides him with maps and other information. He also joins his fellow prisoners in acts of sabotage, including the wreck of a huge supply train. He and Cole are sent back to their old Stalag, smuggling the papers past the initial strip inspection by pretending to be infested with lice.

The escape plan proceeds apace, with every detail accounted for, and the day comes for the 200 chosen men to leave. Coward is the one to break the tunnel open, into a pine grove. He strikes tree roots. The delay leaves 20 men stuck in the tunnel and 180 in the hut. A guard is approaching. The men decide to cover up by singing, pretending it's a party. The concertina player sacrifices his place in line and goes outside, pretending to be drunk. The guard takes him away, not unkindly.

Courage breaks through, but they are short of the woods. The men must run for the trees when the searchlight passes. We are not shown how the rest of the escape goes. At the train station. Irena appears and helps Courage get on the train for Vienna. Once there, they kiss and he promises to return after the war. She goes to buy his ticket. Coward surrenders to guards to protect her, and finds several of his comrades, including Pope, waiting under guard.

.Coward and Pope are assigned to the IG Farben work camp, near the Belsen concentration camp, “whose name is now a symbol for the most bestial depravity in the entire history of mankind.” The war progresses and they escape. While posing as workmen clearing rubble, they meet a jeep full of Americans who tell them the front line is only a mile away but there is a “road full of krauts” in their way. They steal a fire engine and uniforms and speed down the road, bell ringing frantically. The German convoy moves aside, and they drive off to freedom, singing “There is a Tavern in the Town”. A full chorus of men’s voices joins in the verse: “Adieu kind friends, adieu, adieu…”

• Dirk Bogarde as Sergeant-Major Charles Coward
• Maria Perschy as Irena
• Alfred Lynch as Corporal Bill Pope
• Nigel Stock as Cole
• Reginald Beckwith as Unteroffizier
• Richard Marner as Schmidt
• Ed Devereaux as the Aussie
• Lewis Fiander as Pringle
• George Mikell as Necke
• Richard Carpenter as Robinson
• Bernard Archard as first prisoner of war
• Ferdy Mayne as first German officer at French farm
• George Pravda as second German officer at French farm
• Olaf Pooley as German doctor
• Michael Mellinger as Feldwebel
• Colin Blakely as first German goon
• Margaret Whiting as French farm woman
• Mark Eden as second prisoner of war
• Douglas Livingstone as Bennett
• Arnold Marlé as Old Man on Train
• Charles Durning as American GI (uncredited)

Cast notes: Richard Marner appeared in the role of German officer Schmidt; he later played another German officer in the 1980s BBC comedy 'Allo 'Allo!.

The recreation of German prisoner of war camps took place in the English countryside.

The Password Is Courage is based on John Castle's biography of Sergeant-Major Charles Coward. Serving as technical advisor during the filming, Coward also has a cameo in the film during a party scene. The film is shot entirely in England; street scenes were filmed in the Chiltern market towns of Amersham and Chesham.[2]

Dirk Bogarde served with distinction during the war, and saw Bergen Belsen immediately after it was liberated.

The film raised some debate among ex-prisoners of war. There are no known survivors of any of Coward's escapes, and the National Ex-Prisoner of War Association (in its Autumn 2006 newsletter) 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 for the film.[3]

In 2013, Shimon Peres, then president of Israel, 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 in Greece in 1941. Perski and Coward had been fellow prisoners, and Peres claimed that some episodes in the film were based on his father's exploits at that time.[4]

The original cinema version of The Password Is Courage contained a sequence set in Auschwitz concentration camp, illustrated by drawings.[5] This sequence has been cut from television broadcast prints, but a credit for the drawings remains listed in the film credits.[6][N 1]

The Password Is Courage received mixed reviews from critics because this true story of a prisoner of war was done in a jocular vein, and was considered inauthentic as a result. 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".[7]

According to Kinematograph Weekly the film was considered a "money maker" at the British box office in 1962.[8]

• List of British films of 1962
• Prisoner of war (List of films is at the end of the article.)

Explanatory notes

Citations

Bibliography

• The Password Is Courage at IMDb
• The Password Is Courage at the British Film Institute
• The Password Is Courage at the TCM Movie Database
• The Password Is Courage at AllMovie