Simply Perfect

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

A two - hander,really,with Miss Colbert and Mr Hayakawa striking ostensibly unlikely sparks off each other as the prisoner and the Commandant who find a rather shaky common ground,pragmatists both. It should be understood that in Japanese military culture prisoners of war were regarded as objects of contempt,almost "untermenschen",in a fashion not far removed from our respected European neighbour's attitude towards Jews,Russians,Gypsies,homosexuals and just about anyone who couldn't prove 100 years of Aryan ancestry. Few ordinary Japanese soldiers were cosmopolitan sophisticates with a taste for Western ways,but,fortunately for Miss Colbert she comes under the patronage of Mr Hayakawa as an American - educated officer who is familiar with her work as an author and a certain mutual tolerance is engendered. Undoubtedly this makes life easier for both her and her son during a difficult time. Virtually the only other sizeable part is played by Miss Florence Desmond,a popular cabaret performer of the time whose material was regarded as rather "risque".She sometimes appeared on the BBC in "Cafe Continentale",which,unfortunately,was way past my bedtime. By 1950 Japan was on the way to becoming "Americanised" and therefore no longer considered a pariah.As a recognition of this,movies were allowed to show the Japanese (or at least a small proportion of them) in a more positive light."Three came home" benefited from this more positive attitude and Mr Hayakawa was allowed to portray the commandant if not as an Oscar Schindler then at least as a decent man torn between the historic military code his uniform represents and his humanitarian instincts.Indeed some might think he regains the moral high ground with the bombing of Hiroshima. A few years later the virtually forgotten "Teahouse of the August moon" completed Hollywood's "re - education" of the Japanese people and they were welcomed back into the wonderful world of Cary Grant,Rock Hudson and Doris Day.I hope they have forgiven us. So "Three came home" is an important film historically as it marks the start of a softening of post Pearl Harbour attitudes.Unfortunately,the performances of the two leads always excepted,it is in every other way unremarkable.

This P.O.W movie is unusual in that it's set in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp that housed women and children on the island of Borneo and is based on a true story. It's directed, superbly, by Jean Negulesco and it may be his best and most under-valued film. What's most remarkable is that it treats the Japanese with a considerable degree of sympathy, certainly not as heroes but neither as the monsters of other similar pictures.There are a number of superb sequences that build both character and real tension and even the clichés of the prison camp genre are very subtly subverted. It may be no masterpiece but it stands head and shoulders above many more famous films. First-rate performances, too, from Claudette Colbert in the central role of the sole American prisoner and from Sessue Hayakawa, as outstanding here as the camp commandant as he was in "The Bridge on the River Kwai".

First-rate production from TCF. The studio's craftsmanship is really in evidence in this atmospheric and moving account of one woman's heroic effort at surviving Japanese internment during WWII. A highly de-glamorized Colbert is simply superb as real-life Britisher Agnes Keith imprisoned on Borneo with her small boy in the early days of the war. Those nightmarish jungle scenes with the wind and the foliage have stayed with me over the years and cast an appropriately unstable mood over the movie as a whole. Credit ace director Jean Negulesco for bringing out the film's strong emotional values without sentimentalizing them. He continues to be an underrated movie-maker from the dynamic studio period.We know from Sessue Hayakawa's cultivated Japanese colonel that Hollywood is changing its perceptions of our former enemy. Cruel stereotypes do continue (presumably based on fact), but the colonel's character is humanized to an unusually sympathetic degree-- even his loss in the recent atomic bombing of Hiroshima is mentioned. Then too, it's well to remember that during the war our government interned US citizens of Japanese extraction in pretty inhospitable camps along the eastern Sierras, and probably illegally so.Anyway, the movie has the look and feel of the real thing, while the producers should be saluted for using as many actual locations as possible. The fidelity shows. Since the story is the thing, the cast appropriately has no stars except for Colbert, which helps produce the realistic effect. There are a number of riveting and well-staged scenes. But the staging of the final crowd re-union scene strikes me as particularly well done. And, of course, there's that final heart-breaking view of the hilltop that still moves me, even 60 years later. All in all, this is the old Hollywood system at its sincere and de-glamorized best.

I think this is a very interesting film which is a product of its time. Agnes Newton Keith was a prisoner of the Japanese, first at Berhala Island near Sandakan in North Borneo, and then at Batu Lintang camp at Kuching in Sarawak, also on the island of Borneo (NOT Sumatra as someone else stated in one of the other comments - Paradise Road is based on the book White Coolies by Betty Jeffery!). She published a book, Three Came Home, abut her time in the camps in 1946 and this film makes a fair go of following the book without too many nods to Hollywood. Parts of it were filmed on location in Borneo, although the studio parts are very obvious. Claudette Colbert gives a good performance, despite appearing too well-groomed and well-fed (this was before The Method!), and Sessue Hayakawa is excellent.A couple of notes: some liberties have been taken with the text for dramatic reasons (Keith was not the lone American woman - there were four in the predominantly British and Dutch women's camp) and I would recommend reading her book for greater details. For those interested in the camp, there is also a very good page on Wikipedia about the camp (look under Batu Lintang camp), with web links and a reading list, and there are also pages on Wikipedia about Agnes Newton Keith and Tatsuji Suga as well as all the main actors and writers, production staff, directors etc involved in the film. Well worth finding a bit more about such an interesting period in our history.Mama Perez 29 August 2007