Sticking with British director Basil Dearden (see POOL OF LONDON directly below), here’s a well made P.O.W. pic that holds close to the usual conventions. Less than a year after the war and all those Prisoner-of-War tropes already in place as men left behind in the Dunkirk evacuation march to heatless barracks, food shortages, delays on Red Cross packages & news from home, escape attempts, a spot of landscaping, Christmas pantomimes, Dear John letters & camp hijinks.* With so many events, these films are always in danger of making P.O.W. Camp look like summer camp . . . but with real bullets. (Wait!, my summer camp did have real bullets!) There’s also action on the home-front: from Pre-War days via flashback (as in Noël Coward’s IN WHICH WE SERVE/’42) and current happenings, especially for Michael Redgrave’s Czech Concentration Camp escapee hiding in plain sight using the uniform of a dead British officer whose body he literally bumped into. Needing to maintain the impersonation, he corresponds with the dead man’s estranged wife who assumes her husband is not only alive, but a better person than the cold man she left before the war. This leads to some interesting complications, not quite brought off here in a script that has too many happy endings. On the other hand, Redgrave’s ‘wife’ is played by real wife Rachel Kempson in a rare screen sighting, looking amazingly like all her famous children: Corin, Vanessa & Lynn, from different angles. She’s very good, as is everyone in here, but the film is awfully predictable.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Very brief BLACKFACE Alert during a nighttime mission in camp.
DOUBLE-BILL: *The P.O.W. format was so quickly codified that by 1951 on B’way (1953 on film) STALAG 17 got much of its dramatic charge playing off them.
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