The Password Is Courage

The Password Is Courage (1962)

The only man ever awarded the Iron Cross by the enemy!!!

Sergeant-Major Charles Coward, a brave British soldier is captured by German forces during World War II. When he's thrown into a prisoner of war camp, he immediately plans his escape. Masquerading as a wounded German soldier, he makes it as far as the medical tent, where the deceived enemy forces award him the Iron Cross. Though he is ultimately discovered, he goes on to courageously pursue his freedom with a whimsical and undying audacity.

Date of release
1962-06-01
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (24)
Runtime
1h 56m
Genres
Comedy, Drama, War
Director
Andrew L. Stone

Casting

Interesting facts

The Password Is Courage is a 1962 British comedy-drama war film written, produced, and directed by Andrew L. Stone and starring Dirk Bogarde, Maria Perschy, and Alfred Lynch. It was based on The Password Is Courage, the 1954 World War II biography/novel about Sergeant-Major Charles Coward by Ronald Payne and John Williams Garrod. It was distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Production

It was the first in a three picture deal between Andrew Stone and MGM.

Sergeant-Major Charles Coward served as technical advisor during the filming, Coward also has a cameo in the film during a party scene. The film is shot entirely in England; street scenes were filmed in the Chiltern market towns of Amersham and Chesham.

Dirk Bogarde served with distinction during the war, and saw Bergen Belsen immediately after it was liberated.

The film raised some debate among ex-prisoners of war. There are no known survivors of any of Coward's escapes, and the National Ex-Prisoner of War Association (in its Autumn 2006 newsletter) suggested that some of the stories in his biography might have happened to other men in the camps, with some events "borrowed" for the book and for the film.

In 2013, Shimon Peres, then president of Israel, disclosed that his father, Yitzchak Perski, who migrated from Poland to Mandatory Palestine in 1932, had joined the British Army in 1939 and was captured by the Germans in Greece in 1941. Perski and Coward had been fellow prisoners, and Peres claimed that some episodes in the film were based on his father's exploits at that time.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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