Watch The Password Is Courage For Free

Just perfect...

A lot of fun.

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

Not just very much like The Great Escape - both films shared prisoners using the same techniques for obtaining materials, tunneling, disposal of dirt from the tunnel, hiding the tunnel entrance under stoves & the same slight issue with the tunnel exit.I'd not seen this Borgarde film before TCM aired it, so it was startling how many plot similarities it shared with it's much more well known compatriot - I understand that both were in production around the same time (though Courage came out first), so neither were remakes of the other, but whether both referenced the same source material (Courage was apparently derived from the memoirs of Sgt Major Charles Coward), I'm not sure.A side note: Anyone familiar with railways in England in the 60's will quickly notice that all the railway scenes in Courage, while supposed to be in continental Europe, were clearly filmed in England with a few cosmetic tweaks (German signage, smoke deflectors on the steam locomotives) to try to disguise things. The film also originally had a sequence representing events at Auschwitz, that was pulled at some point - presumably for being too dark a subject matter. You can still tell where this sequence was intended to be, as a narrative piece alludes to it, but the film immediately moves on.

This film is a biography about Sergeant Major Charles Coward (played by Dirk Bogarde), a most unusual prisoner of war during WWII. I say most unusual because he was constantly escaping or causing mayhem. But be forewarned...the film is not exactly his wartime experiences. Instead of showing the full range of his life, it tends to pick out events that were humorous and make the film like a less funny and more intelligent version of "Hogan's Heroes". The darker aspects of his life, such as his exposure and work with the Jews at Auschwitz were omitted from the picture in order to present the German soldiers as buffoons narrative...a very incomplete picture to say the least. There is no evidence of the SS, massacres or death camps in this film. Now this is NOT to say it's a bad film. Supposedly the events portrayed, with a few exceptions, did occur and Coward's life was amazing and made for an interesting film. Well worth seeing...but it could have been better.

A group of British P.O.W.s march through the woods on the German/Polish border singing gaily;as they sit down to rest,one of them,the badly - injured Sergeant Major Coward(Mr D.Bogarde),slips away from the guards and makes his escape through what is obviously the English countryside till he finds what is equally obviously an English farmhouse where he persuades the owner to let him rest in the barn.A convoy of injured Wermacht soldiers suddenly arrive and are dumped on the barn floor around him.He slips a blanket over himself and is taken with the other casualties to a hospital where he is given apparently at random an Iron Cross.Such fun. Sgt Major Coward continues to play jolly japes on the surprisingly tolerant Germans,and all this schoolboy stuff gets a bit tedious after an hour or so. The Brits burst into song at the least opportunity,and a lot of comic - book Nazis sneer rather rudely at their prisoners.And that's about it,really. So what makes this extremely average British war film worth 7 out of 10?Well,it's very subjective,of course,but Mr Bogarde,to me,was never better than when freed from his "upper - class Englishman"leash,and the necessity for incessant sighs of boredom/angst/feyness. Here as Charles Coward he is playing a Londoner(but not your archetypal jolly cockney)shrewd,calculating and irrepressible. He plays him brilliantly;not condescending,never allowing us to doubt for a moment(at least not while the film is playing)that this is a believable character who finds himself in some unbelievable situations. And dear old James Hayter is endearingly bad as a Camp Commandant who is clearly more the former than the latter. Along with "Very Important Person","The Password is courage" is right at the top of the light - hearted P.O.W. movie pantheon,and Mr Bogarde's admirers are strongly recommended to watch it.

The Password is Courage is another one of those "prisoner of war escape movies" but is not ""Just"" a typical pow escape movie. This movie in particular is one of my all-time favorite movies of this type. Dirk Bogarde portrays a real-life personality in the name of Sergeant Major Coward. I think that Bogardes acting in this film was most excellent and is one reason why this film must be remembered and brought back into mainstream movie watching.This film though is a serious film, also has many comical moments in it as well. One moment I really liked was when the Allied POWs managed to sabotage two German trains by switching their delivery signs around as well as sabotaging parts on the trains to make sure the trains wrecked. Another comical moment is when their camp was almost burnt down to the ground when they made sure a careless German Unteroffizier, who had a routine when he smoked his pipe, that the allied prisoners quickly caught onto and set up an elaborate plan. The plan was that they switched the sand in the Fire-buckets with Petrol--un-beknownst by the German guards.On a particular windy day, the German NCO was careless a usual, by throwing his match into a pile of wood--which immediately started a fire. The POWs then threw the contents of the buckets onto the fire--making it rapidly spread. In short, they almost completed in burning down that camp.This movie was so well made that it really needs to be released in DVD so that we all can enjoy watching it over and over again.