Fresh and Exciting

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

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.

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.

This is the fourth and last of the heart-wrenching Claudette Colbert World War II films, the previous being SO PROUDLY WE HAIL! (1943), SINCE YOU WENT AWAY (1944) and TOMORROW IS FOREVER (1946) in which she played, respectively a brave Army nurse, a struggling home-front wife and mother and a WW I widow who passionately tries to keep her only son from participating in WW II. In THREE CAME HOME she plays Agnes Keith, an American author married to a British colonial officer (Patrick Knowles) living in Borneo. When the Japanese invade the island they imprison the American and British residents. The Keiths are interned in separate jungle camps – one for women and children and another for men – for three and a half grueling years. It is true that at times Colbert doesn't quite look like a prison camp starveling but in those days movies did not offer the sort of hyperrealism we've grown accustomed to since the 60's, but she certainly does not look like she stepped out of a beauty salon. In fact I can think of no other film in which she appeared more plain and unvarnished. Few if any actresses of her stature in that era would have taken on the physical demands of this role. Unfortunately it was also her final socko performance on film. None of her 50's work came close to her substantial work here and she was all but wasted in PARRISH (1961). But here both she and Sessue Hayakawa as the prison camp commander deliver true and memorable performances as mortal enemies whose mutual interest in literature and shared experience of parenthood create a tenuous bond that augments the suspense and dramatic impact of the story.Based on a memoir by the real-life Mrs. Keith (who was quite a character in her own right, and not remotely like Colbert), there is a vein of intelligence running through the proceedings, lifting them out of the mainstream of the often jingoistic wartime prison film genre. The Japanese are depicted in a dignified and fair manner without being whitewashed; in fact, in an early scene Hayakawa praises Mrs. Keith for the balanced views in her book about the Orient which he had read before the war. It is precisely his respect for her broadminded attitude that probably saved her life. Nunnally Johnson's script is tight and focused, as is the whole enterprise. The emphasis is on human relationships, so that by the end we are swept up in the emotional life of the characters. A bright note is the casting of a winning boy actor named Mark Keuning who has to be one of the best and most believable child actors ever. He appeared in only two movies, both in 1950, before retreating permanently from films.This is a film worth seeing again and again. It has lost none of its essential power over the decades. Other films are grittier, with more blood and pus and exaggerated savagery, more breathtaking location shooting and exotic cultural immersion, but few can pack the kind of punch this one does. The ending is one of the most moving you will ever see.

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