The skipper's in the wardroom drinking gin

The internet is killingly slow for reasons relating to RCN having apparently melted down around one o'clock this afternoon (customer support lines included), so instead of anything that requires extended interaction, here is a photograph of my niece. Technically she is wearing a fluffy scarf belonging to my mother.



I think somebody needs to see Ponyo (2008) stat.

Why did you have to write the way you did?

The Captive Heart (1946) is one of the more unusual prisoner-of-war films I've encountered and almost certainly the weirdest Cyrano variant I've seen in my life. It was directed by Basil Dearden and released less than a year after V-E Day; it was filmed "at Ealing Studios, London and in the British Zone of Germany," specifically at the real-life POW camp of Marlag und Milag Nord. There are no escapes in this movie. No clever rescues. With one central, risky exception, there is not even any of the heroic trickery of the Germans that so often characterizes this genre. Its protagonists are the soldiers of the BEF for whom Dunkirk was not a miracle—who held the perimeter against the Germans until the ships were gone and then spent the rest of their war behind barbed wire—and one of them is not what he seems. That doesn't go the usual way, either.

We aren't sure at first. The men as we meet them trudging the long, dusty miles from the coast of France to the Rhine form a familiar cross-section of British characters, sketched with flashbacks in the most important cases—Jack Warner and Mervyn Johns as working-class veterans joking with their wives about French beer and French girls and the suspiciously familiar ring of "home by Christmas," Derek Bond as a budding composer who married into the middle of a love quadrangle right before shipping out, Gordon Jackson now jolting blinded on a horse-drawn cart, but he got engaged to his girl literally as the troop train was pulling away. Basil Radford's senior British officer is less Blimpish than his moustache suggests, but Jimmy Hanley's wide boy is brasher than his actual experience warrants. There's one doctor and one chaplain among them and a lot of wounded. When Michael Redgrave steps in at the depot to interpret in German nearly as clean as his well-bred English, there's no reason to assume he's anything but an officer and a gentleman with a Continental education, but when we see inside his head as he sways half-asleep on the train taking them to "Kriegsgefangenen Offizier-Lager XXVII," he's crop-haired, dressed in rough civilian clothes, diving for cover beneath a bombed-out bridge while gunfire crashes and rattles above his head. There's a soldier crouched there already, but the man sprawls dead in the dirty water when Redgrave shakes him. The idea occurs as inescapably as the feel of a stopped heart. He rifles the dead man's pockets, tosses the sheaf of pin-up photos but retains the papers of Captain Geoffrey Mitchell of the 5th Oxfordshire Light Infantry; he fastens the dead man's identity disc around his own wrist. It's the dead man's uniform we realize he's wearing as we fade out of the memory, back into the boxcar where the slatted light flickers like film across the face of a man whose name we don't know after all.

In fact the movie will not make him that much of a secret, although it will reserve his real name until long after we have gotten to know what he's like; by the end of the first act we know that he was a Czech officer interned in Dachau after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, who escaped the concentration camp only to find his safe haven of France falling around him. His English is explained by a father in the foreign service and a childhood in London: "I became professor of English at Prague University. I'm not much of a soldier, I'm afraid." Now the suspense is not whether he can be trusted not to betray his fellow prisoners, but whether he can do a better job of not betraying himself. Seeing "Mitchell"'s story confirmed by the suspicions of the Gestapo chief who once interrogated him, the British POWs decide to rally around their gallant cuckoo, which is where the Cyrano plot comes in. When the first letters from home arrive courtesy of the Red Cross, Karel Hašek discovers that Geoffrey Mitchell has a wife. Had, really: first he ran around on her and then he ran out on her and if he came back alive, she didn't expect him to come back to her. But she writes to her husband once she's established his apparent whereabouts in Oflag XXVII, because she will not have it said that she didn't hold up her end of the social contract despite his characteristically callous gesture of not listing her as next of kin, and when Karel who knows nothing of this messy history shows her letter to Radford's Major Dalrymple, it's agreed all round that he has no choice but to write back. Karel's mimicry of Englishness goes only so far as his accent: he can't afford to attract any more German attention, even the helpful inquiries of the Red Cross. He has no idea how to write to another man's wife, in another man's voice, in presumable love with her and believably homesick for a country he hasn't seen since he was a boy. His own family are dead, shot in reprisal for sheltering Jews. He takes his love and his grief and his double exile from everything he thinks of as home and begins his letter with double-speaking honesty: "It is a world cut off completely from the real world. Time stands still here. The future is remote, the present empty. Even the past begins to seem unreal. But a man must have something to hold onto. He must forge links to keep him sane. Will you write to me again, Celia, as though I were a stranger, somebody who knows nothing of your life and your home—even of yourself?"

I think this is one of the more interesting twists on the ghost marriage I've run into, in no small part because it is anchored in the idea of national as well as personal identity as performance. Karel's long-distance impersonation of the late semi-lamented Mitchell is initially achieved with help from his fellow POWs who remind him that Jane is a popular strip in the Daily Mirror and that the 5th Oxfordshire Light Infantry never had machine-gun companies, but it is soon sustained by its own imaginative power and by the collaboration of Mitchell's wife herself. We see her in cutaways from the camp to the home front, a slender woman in her mid-thirties with two young children and a father who thinks she's a fool to write to the man who abandoned her; she is played by Rachel Kempson, Redgrave's real-life wife, and she is not stupid. On some level Celia knows that the man on the other end of the correspondence can't be her faithless husband—it would be a lovely fairy tale if the horrors of war and imprisonment had knocked some decency into him, but while an unfamiliar handwriting can be easily glossed with injury, nothing explains the tender change in tone, the suddenly poetic command of language, and the emotional openness it is implied she never got from Geoffrey at his best. She never asks if he's really Geoffrey, who he is if he's not. He's doing everything she always wished Geoffrey would. Nor is it all pretense: Karel who by the end of 1939 had lost everyone he loved asks after her children with real affection and interest. It's no small thing when he puts the latest snapshots of them up on the wall with the rest of his hut's collage of loved ones and magazine cut-outs. He's faking the particulars, but the heart is real. Celia asks if they can start over again, which is like an invitation to begin. She is building a fantasy as much as Karel and the England that blossoms between their letters is accordingly the most idyllic, romantic version of itself:

"The apple trees are in full blossom already, making the orchard look like a sheet of fleecy snow. And Ten Acre Meadow is all white, too, because this year that's where the ewes are pastured with their lambs. Soon the garden will be filled with the scent and color of the may. And beyond the river, you can see the first vivid green of the larches in the bluebell wood."

Given this emphasis on fantasy, it is especially grounding that The Captive Heart makes as visible an effort at realism as it does. Life in Oflag XXVII is sanitized (and I am skeptical about a successful escape from Dachau in the spring of 1940, although since I don't know how much information on concentration camps would have been available to the screenwriters in late 1945/early 1946, I might have to give them a pass on that detail), but it's not rose-colored and several of its scenes play strikingly against later tropes of the genre. When the British POWs first come in sight of the camp, Major Dalrymple has them march to attention so that at least they'll enter like an army, not a ragtag crocodile of stumbling, beaten men; they file through the gates whistling "There'll Always Be an England," but it seems a very small and forlorn sound, out of step with itself and easily lost against the dull flat sky and the skeletal walls of barbed wire. The soundtrack doesn't swell to meet it, "Colonel Bogey"-style. The scene in which the assembled prisoners drown out a propaganda broadcast with "Roll Out the Barrel" is similarly un-Hollywood: it takes a nerve-rackingly long time for anyone to join Warner's stout belting of "our great battle hymn" and the best they can manage against the loudspeakers blaring "Denn wir fahren gegen Engeland" is a draw. It's not chopped liver, but it's not the "Marseillaise" at Rick's Café Américain, either. Some of Karel's letters to Celia encourage a picture of tenacious national spirit, the British keeping calm and carrying on in captivity as ever. One such voiceover is accompanied by a montage of activities that make the POW camp look like a summer camp: gardening, choir-singing, making and mending clothes, a well-stocked library, lectures on painting and anatomy, games of boxing and basketball, and amateur dramatics where the nipples on the drag turns could put your eye out. "And that is true not only of us here in our little wire-enclosed cinder patch, but also of the scores of other camps throughout Germany, big sprawling towns of twenty thousand men or hamlets of a few hundred, each a little piece of England." Again, the imagined thing that is nonetheless real. But he also reports faithfully on the dreariness, the privation, the privileges revoked for botched escape attempts or for nothing more than calculated demoralization: "It's not the duration but the indefiniteness of duration . . . the wet days, the wet weeks, those days when it seemed an effort to do nothing and our bunks were the only release. Deep down in the hearts of all of us there dwells a lonely ache, a desperate yearning for those we love and a fear—fear of becoming forgotten men." And the script goes the duration. It isn't until the spring of 1944 that we get a hint that any of our characters might get out before the war's end: "Repatriation! And this time it's the real McCoy!"

( I allowed myself to dream that these letters of ours could come to life. )

I had never heard of The Captive Heart before it rated a mention in Andrew Moor's Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces (2012), where it is appropriately invoked in context of Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff falling in love with his English wife's homeland in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). It seems to have gotten a StudioCanal Blu-Ray/DVD last year and been somewhat low-profile among British war films until then. It's strange enough that I can see how it slipped through the cracks: a documentary-styled ensemble drama with a melodramatic device in the middle of it, leading to a premise with satirical overtones—the perfect English husband is a Czech professor with a prison camp's worth of British pop culture to draw on—that is played romantically straight. The newsreaderly monologue that opens the film dedicates it to the unsung heroism of prisoners of war, then largely pulls back from triumphalism to show what small, grinding, endless units of time heroism can be made of. Its characters do not always behave like credits to their respective nationalities; not all of them get happy endings. Personally, since this is a bunch of soldiers we're tracking across five years in close quarters, I am delighted by the degree of blue-adjacent humor that made it past the British Board of Film Censors' "A" rating. A soldier at home makes teasing mention of a "savory piece in Lille" who "taught [him] a thing or two" and his wife mourns, "Pity you kept it to yourself!" When another asks a fellow inmate how to spell "sufficient," he's told it's the "same as the sergeant-major's blessing. Two F's and one C." A bragging session about girls is finally capped with "Your experience! Gorblimey, one sniff of a barmaid's apron and you'd be on your hands and knees, sonny boy." And some of the news from home is still terrible, and the war is ongoing, and it is a bad sign that Dai has started planting asparagus when everyone knows that "takes seven years a crop," but at least nobody suffering and waiting feels like a plaster saint. Even the nicest identity theft may do that to a narrative. This letter brought to you by my enduring backers at Patreon.