Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Kamila Bell This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Robert J. Maxwell The story of Claudette Colbert, her husband Patrick Knowles, and their young child during the Japanese occupation of Borneo shortly after Pearl Harbor in 1941. In précis it looks pretty ominous. The brutal Japanese, the sobbing women, the starving children, the constant insults and beatings. And this is, after all, 1950, probably written and shot mostly in 1949, with the war a short four years behind. It was less than a decade earlier that the war-time movies had been calling the Japanese "bandy legged monkeys" (Robert Taylor in "Bataan") and calling for them to be "wiped off the face of the earth" (Henry Hull in "Objective Burma.").Well, the authoress of the book this is based on can be glad she wasn't a Chinese woman when the Japanese occupied Nanking in China, true enough, but this film is more nuanced than any other I can think of from the period. It's, well, it's credible. Japanese prison camps were much harder on prisoners than the German Stalags. The Japanese were equally hard on their own warriors. The aviation cadets at Etajima endured a long and strenuous training program and were beaten routinely with sticks for errors. Late in the war, officers on Chichi Jima ate the liver of decomposing American corpses. Not that they enjoyed it; they were half drunk before they could bring themselves to do it. It was a demonstration to the men that even the most disgusting acts could be overcome with courage.At any rate, the Japanese, let by Colonel Sesue Hayakawa, separated men and women into different camps but nobody ate any livers. The Japanese guards followed orders implicitly, and when Hayakawa was absent, one of them rapes Colbert and later twists her arm brutally to get her to sign a fake admission. But they're not the raving maniacs of "Purple Heart." And Hayakawa is a horse of a different color; a nice guy, literate, understanding, a graduate of the University of Washington, who enjoys children and grieves when three of his own are killed in Hiroshima.It's rather surprising to find the Japanese being treated so evenly in a film from the 1950s. They're not "good" but they're not "bandy legged monkeys" either. They're just believable.Hayakawa delivers a fine subdued performance and it's certainly Colbert's most notable dramatic role. It's worth catching -- an adult movie about the war, when most of Western cinema was just recovering from a long spell of enmity.

vincentlynch-moonoi This is a rather remarkable film because it is a basically true story, and much of it was filmed in locales where it actually took place.Made in 1950, it is rather faithfully based on the memoirs of Agnes Newton Keith. It tells the story of her family's ordeal of being civilian POWs of the Japanese after the Japanese invasion of what is today Indonesia. Keith and her young son were interned at a camp in Sarawak, which was not liberated until September, 1945. Her husband had been a British official in the region and was interned at a different camp for men.None of us can imagine what it must have been like for the Brits taken prisoner, but this film gives one a pretty good idea. As I watched the film several things occurred to me. First that these women and children -- at least according to this film -- had to live much as many "locals" live in southeast Asia today "upcountry". I lived in Thailand for a while, and when I visited my partner's village in 2010, I saw conditions much like some depicted in this film. Of course, it is different when you are prisoner. I also detected racial tension, though subtle, in this film.Surprisingly, the most touching scenes of the film were when the Japanese camp commandant learns this his entire family was killed in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and he takes 3 of the British children to his temporary home near the camp for a sort of picnic.As always, Claudette Colbert was excellent here, as was Sessue Hayakawa, who plays a very different role than his character in "The Bridge On The River Kwai".This is not a film I want on my DVD shelf, but it is very good.

bkoganbing Claudette Colbert got one of her best late career roles in Three Came Home, the moving story of the experiences of Agnes Newton Keith and her time in a Japanese POW camp. Keith earned her status by dint of being married to a British colonial official in North Borneo who is played by Patric Knowles in the best stiff upper lip tradition.On the screen and in real life Keith was a novelist who faithfully recorded oriental life with some empathy in her books. That got her some favorable treatment from the Japanese, in the film in the form of an ally of sorts in a colonel played by Sessue Hayakawa.Hayakawa's performance is the highlight of the film. It may very well have been the first time post World War II that a Japanese character was given three dimensions. Of course the brutality of the Japanese prison camps is also shown in the best tradition of that other World War II film Sessue Hayakawa did, The Bridge On The River Kwai.1950 was definitely the year for women in stir. A few weeks before this film came out, MGM released Caged which certainly has some of the same themes as Three Came Home. Of course the big difference is that over at MGM the women were criminals in a civilian setting.Three Came Home directed by Jean Negulesco who normally did lighter material than this, holds up very well for today's audience. Colbert, Knowles, and Hayakawa do some of their best screen work here and definitely try to catch this one when broadcast.

edwagreen In 1944's "Since You Went Away," Claudette Colbert suffered at the home front. Now, 6 years later, she is a prisoner of war in Borneo.An excellent depiction of what these people went through in Japanese prison camps when their territory was occupied during World War 11.Colbert gave still another excellent performance as a writer interned who braved Japanese savagery and survived.Sessue Hayakawa is marvelous as the Japanese commander torn between having a heart and dictating the traditional Japanese methods of brutality. His heart rendering performance truly reaches a climax at the film's end.Due to his long separation from his wife, the role of the husband for Colbert is not given the opportunity to fully express himself. Patric Knowles was unable to develop his part.