The Password Is Courage is a 1962 British comedy-drama war film written, produced, and directed by Andrew L. Stone and starring Dirk Bogarde, Maria Perschy, and Alfred Lynch.

When he is being transferred to Stalag VIII-B, the injured Coward escapes from a forced march, finding refuge in a French farmhouse and barn that is soon requisitioned by a German army unit setting up a field hospital.

On the way to the camp, he engineers the total destruction of an enemy ammunition train: He and his fellow prisoners toss flaming bundles of straw, set on fire with his cigarette lighter, into the passing rail cars.

There are no known survivors of any of Coward's escapes, and the National Ex-Prisoner of War Association (in its Autumn 2006 newsletter) suggested that some of the stories in his biography might have happened to other men in the camps, with some events "borrowed" for the book and for the film.

[4] In 2013, Shimon Peres, then president of Israel, disclosed that his father, Yitzchak Perski, who immigrated from Poland to Mandatory Palestine in 1932, had joined the British Army in 1939 and was captured by the Germans in Greece in 1941.

[8] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Andrew Stone's adaptation has gleefully mined the wealth of narrative incident and humour in John Castle's biography.

But that account of the wartime career of Charles Coward – for all its adventure story framework – had an element of severity in keeping with its subject, and its main character emerged as a man of genuinely heroic proportions.

By concentrating on the lighthearted image of the British cockney – password courage, trademark humour – the film version, however, looks more like a Boy Scouts' charade: a frivolous tribute to a man who could trade in dynamite and dead bodies to evacuate live ones from Auschwitz.

The script, in fact, skids over these intolerable passages in his experience by the appallingly inappropriate insertion of a series of eye-witness sketches, which serve only to remind one that there was a grimmer side to outwitting the Germans – and that they were not to be fooled by a suave twist of the Bogarde eyebrow and a cocksure grin. ...

The most triumphant aspect of Andrew Stone's direction is his ability to inject a life of their own into inanimate objects – the leap of flame, the merriment of an exhaust-pipe bobbing across the screen as a tank charts its own destructive course, the fracturing ribs of an escape tunnel, the splendid pile-up of a disintegrating goods train.

But apart from Alfred Lynch's gay, affectionate Billy, the human element is cast in a farcical mould, and the action veers uncomfortably between the conventions of dramatic suspense and near-slapstick comedy – with a perfunctory and fictional dash of romance for makeweight.

"[9] Variety noted: "Andrew L. Stone’s screenplay, based on a biog of Sergeant-Major Charles Coward by John Castle, has pumped into its untidy 116 minutes an overdose of slapstick humour.