The Captive Heart

Five years spent in a German prisoner of war camp. The men in the camp come from different lives and the film opens each of their stories in turn. The central one is Hasek's, a Czech who has to hide his identity from the Nazis and does so by taking the place of a dead English officer. He begins corresponding with that man's wife. Directed by Basil Dearden, the film was made straight after the war and part of it was shot in Germany, in the British occupation zone, which gives it a documentary texture. The telling produces no heroism; the length of captivity, its tedium and the lives left behind are the subject. Michael Redgrave plays Hasek. It is one of the postwar works of the Ealing studio.