After the Second World War, some British soldiers are guarding a theatre in Germany containing various refugees and prisoners trying to work out what to do with them. However, the displaced people, after uniting against fascism for five years, begin to disintegrate into their own ancient feuds: Serb against Croat, Pole against Russian, resistance fighter against collaborator and everyone against the Jews. Two people, Jan and Lily, begin a romance and decide to wed. However, one of the refugees is diagnosed with bubonic plague.[4]
Associate producer Alfred Roome called the film "terrible ... we shot for ages, then it stopped and started again and got terribly boring ... it actually had two or three directors who came and went."[5]
There is nothing wrong with the theme (though it has lost its topicality), but everything wrong with the way in which it is handled: the subject demands deep sympathy and comprehension, but the too-familiar Gainsborough treatment gives it vulgar novelette stature and a blundering insularity. The attempts to be serious and to point a moral give the effect of talking down, as if to an audience of idiots, from the complacent and insulting point of view that foreigners exist merely to get into difficulties from which the British have to extricate them. The script is deplozably crude and stilted, but a greater disaster comes with the direction. Technically incompetent, flat and lifeless, it achieves climaxes solely by loud, emphatic bursts of background music over clumsily-handled crowd movements. The crowds of extras wear their rags and foreign accents uneasily, as might be expected: of the leading players, Mai Zetterling (impeccably made up throughout) gives almost a caricature of her familiar refugee role, Dennis Price is ineffectual and anonymous, Richard Attenborough bewildered, and Siobhan McKenna tries hard to graft Irish charm on to a French communist agitator. One can only hope, at least, that the film will never be shown abroad.[6]
The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film 1/5 stars, writing: "Bridget Boland's play, Cockpit, which tackled the problem of Europeans left stateless and homeless after the Second World War, meant well and was excitingly experimental. This film version, still confined to one set, doesn't work. It's all talk and no action, and additional love scenes, written by Muriel Box, stick out like sore thumbs. Worse, the efforts of British officer Dennis Price to get people of many nationalities to cooperate with each other now come across as xenophobic."[7]
In British Sound Films: The Studio Years 1928–1959David Quinlan rated the film as "average", writing: "Poor transition of stage play to screen, some critics liked it, not so the public."[8]
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