Overrated

Excellent but underrated film

A Masterpiece!

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Beginning in the late forties, peaking in the fifties, and still soldiering on in the sixties the POW film was to the British film industry what the Musical was to Hollywood, i.e. the same old actors ringing the changes on service - army, air force - and roles. Very occasionally they came up with a new angle and turned out something really substantial like Basil Dearden's The Captive Heart but for the most part it was Boy's Own Paper revisited and so it is here. The fact that it is based on a true story doesn't make it another Carve Her Name With Pride (another outstanding example of the genre) and the best you can give this is that it passes the time.

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.

Although this prisoner-of-war picture packs all the familiar ingredients into its plot, somehow it fails to come across even a fraction as effectively as thirty or forty similar movies I could name. Of course, the cast presents a considerable stumbling block. Dirk Bogarde is the only actor who seems to be pulling his weight. Everyone else turns in such lightweight portrayals, you'd think they were vacationing in a holiday camp. Even the Germans are an unconvincing lot. On the plus side, the movie does present some spectacular moments for railroad buffs, and the photography is suitably bleak. All told, I suppose the movie would offer reasonable entertainment for those who haven't seen "The Wooden Horse", "The Colditz Story", "The Great Escape", etc. But for those who are well acquainted with these far more powerful accounts, "Password" is a limp offering indeed.

I've just finished watching this film for the first time in many years and found it disappointing. The only thing that kept me viewing is the fact that my father was incarcerated in Stalag 8b (the setting for the majority of the film). Although this film is historically correct for the most part the detail is very inaccurate, the acting almost amateur and the depiction of conditions makes the Stalag look like a holiday camp, which it certainly was not.As with the previous comment I can only assume that this is an attempt to make light of a situation that meant many years of hardship and misery for many brave men. Unless you have a personal interest in the film subject I wouldn't bother watching.