Produced by Ealing Studios, starring Michael Redgrave and his wife Rachel Kempson and directed by Basil Dearden mere months after the end of the war, The Captive Heart is one of the first films to be made about British POWs. The film was shot in a real British POW camp, Marlag and Milag in Germany, where co-screenwriter Guy Morgan had been held, and features actors who had been POWs themselves.

In 1940, Czech soldier and POW Capt. Hasek (Michael Redgrave, The Lady Vanishes, The Dam Busters) is being pursued by the Nazi secret police. To conceal his true identity, he pretends to be a dead British soldier named Capt. Geoffrey Mitchell. But to keep the lie going, he must also write to Mitchell’s wife, Celia (Rachel Kempson,  Out of Africa, Tom Jones), as her dead husband, from the camp where he’s imprisoned.Meanwhile, Hasek’s fellow prisoners are beginning to suspect that he is not who he claims to be, so he must convince them that he’s not a spy.

The Captive Heart is a fiercely realistic WW2 drama from Ealing Studios where an unlikely romance is sparked through the sending of letters.