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Predating, anticipating, and in some ways outdoing The Great Escape, for both detail and comic value extracted from the arts of outwitting Germans and escaping from prison camps, Courage is both a rollicking good time and a disturbing exercise in selective storytelling. The ironically named Charlie Coward, played with charm and zest by Dirk Bogarde, was a Sgt-Major of artillery who made an art out of sabotage and skiving when a POW in WW2. Made with an appealing, raw-looking early ’60s naturalism, with its economic location shooting and lack of gloss, much of the plot and process is astoundingly similar to the following year’s blockbuster. The film is sustained by a series of genuinely hilarious set-pieces of destruction and mayhem – many of them absolutely true – that Coward and his compadres accomplish with native cunning and sheer gall, from passing off the plans of a washing machine as a secret weapon, to arranging the destruction of an entire work camp, in a sequence that fittingly quotes Buster Keaton. The film even manages to fit in a decent romantic interest (with Maria Perschy’s comely optometrist/resistance chick).
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But in another sense, the film perverts Coward’s tale in rather shameful ways. He had a good command of German (which he doesn’t have in the film, for convenient tension-building), an ability which saw him appointed as a Red Cross liaison when he and other British POWs were shipped to Auchwitz III. There he earned the nickname “The Count of Auschwitz” for the part he played in smuggling food and weapons into the death camp, and arranging a system for saving lives that rescued some four hundred Jewish slave labourers. For this he has a tree in the Avenue of Righteous Gentiles. To sacrifice such a tale for an amusing comic-drama takes the cake for trivialising. Nonetheless, Coward worked as an advisor on the film: that’s him with Bogarde on the set in the picture.
