The Captive Heart (1946)   Starring: Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson Distributor: StudioCanal RRP: £TBC OPTD2826 Certificate: U Release Date: 16 November 2015

On the run from a concentration camp, Capt. Karel Hasek finds the body of a dead British officer on the battlefield. In order not to be sent back he assumes the officers identity. Captured and moved to a prisoner of war camp he maintains the illusion, of his new identity, by writing the officer’s estranged wife...

The Captive Heart (B&W. 1946. 1 hr, 39 min, 04 sec) is a war melodrama, directed by Basil Dearden, who is better known as the director of Khartoum (1966). The film stared Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, with and excellent supporting cast which included Gordon Jackson and Jack Warner.

The first intriguing thing is that the film opens with an assertion that the story was based on fact, though the characters have been fictionalised. It would have been interesting if there had been an extra which told the audience a little about the event the film was based on rather than leaving a niggling mystery. I can’t imagine that a story of a man who writes for years to a dead man’s wife wouldn’t have been more reported.

There is an authenticity about the look and feel of the film. Completed just following the war's end, the story was filmed in the real POW camps of Marlag Milag in Germany and many of the background actors had themselves been detained in German camps. Oddly enough, Guy Morgan, who wrote the script with Angus MacPhail, was really a prisoner at the camp they filmed in.

The film is really in two parts. On the one hand there is the life of the camp, displaying the camaraderie as well as the hardships which the soldiers endured; it follows their story from capture to release. The other part of the film is the strange growing love between Hasek and Celia. He excuses his change in his handwriting with a fiction about sustaining an injury.

Over the four years the two correspond, with Celia being delighted that her rotter of a husband seems to have had a change of heart and wants to make a go of their marriage. The pay off in the film is how the lady will react when Hasek walks through her door and not her dead husband.

The film is generally well acted, but it is a product of its time, so while all the working class characters talk like normal people, the middle class characters talk a lot like Greyson and Mr. Cholmondley-Warner.

The audio is mono with options for English subtitles and a pretty good print having been fully restored. The disc comes with a single extra, An Introduction by Charles Barr, the author of Ealing Studios, who places the film in its historical context and defends the melodrama inherent in the story.

Placed in its own context this is a good film for its time.

7

Charles Packer