The Captive Heart

Production: Ealing. Director Basil Dearden; Producer Michael Balcon; Screenplay Angus MacPhail, Guy Morgan; Camera Douglas Slocombe; Editor Charles Hasse; Music Alan Rawsthorne;; Art Director Michael Relph
Crew: (B&W) Extract of a review from 1946. Running time: 108 MIN.
With: Michael Redgrave Rachel Kempson Mervyn Johns Jack Warner Basil Radford Gordon Jackson

Second only to the unrelieved grim reality of life as it was lived in Stalags, the outstanding merit of The Captive Heart is the number of superlatively good performances turned in. To Michael Balcon as producer must go chief credit for the newsreel fidelity of the prison camp sequences.

Michael Redgrave, as a Czech, educated in England and fleeing from the Gestapo, takes on the identity of a dead English army officer and is jailed in a Stalag with British soldiers. He escapes lynching only to find himself marked down for a visit to a Nazi gas chamber.

Even when he convinces the British of the truth of his story, and after he has won freedom through repatriation, he’s up against the task of squaring himself with the wife of the dead man whose identity he has assumed. The fact that this final sequence holds one’s attention says something for the writing, acting, and directing.

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