Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Thursday, June 27, 2019

THE CAPTIVE HEART (1946)

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.

No comments: