Three Came Home

Plot synopsis:
American-born Agnes Keith (Colbert) and her British husband Harry Keith (Patric Knowles) live a cushioned colonial life in North Borneo with their young son George in the 1930s. Keith is the only American in Sandakan.
Borneo was strategically important to Japan as it is located on the main sea routes between Java, Sumatra, Malaya and Celebes. Control of these routes was vital to securing the territory. Japan needed an assured supply, particularly of oil, in order to achieve its long-term goal of becoming the major power in the Pacific region.
Worried about the rumours surrounding Japanese invasion in 1941, Harry suggests Agnes move back to the United States along with George. Agnes refuses and she and George remain.
The Imperial Japanese Army invade Borneo and intern the small British community in a camp on Pulau Berhala island off Sandakan. Later they are sent to the notorious Batu Lintang camp near Kuching, Sarawak where the men and women are separated.
During the Japanese invasion of Sandakan, Agnes has a miscarriage.
These camps are under the charge of Colonel Suga (Sessue Hayakawa). Col. Suga is fluent in English and has read a book on Borneo authored by Mrs. Keith. He treats Agnes well.
When Col. Suga visits Agnes at Batu Lintang camp and asks her to autograph a copy of her book as she had agreed to back in the earlier camp. Agnes signs the book with a personal message.
The camp guards are very cruel and oppressive. As seen when they shoot down a group of Australian men who try to cross the wire fencing during a bit of flirtation with the women.
One night, one of the Japanese guards attacks Agnes in an attempted rape, when she runs outside in the night to bring in the washing that is getting blown around in the strong winds. Later she complains to Col. Suga, who asks Lieutenant Nekata to investigate. Unfortunately Agnes is not able to identify her assailant as it was too dark. Nekata insists she identify the assailant by presenting her with a written statement for her to sign. She refuses to do so as she is aware that to make an unsubstantiated accusation against any Japanese soldier is punishable by death. In an effort to get her to sign the statement while Col. Suga is away, she is tortured and threatened by further torture if she says anything to anyone. In great pain she tries to keep her injuries from her fellow captives.
In September 1945 Japan surrenders and Agnes learns from Col. Suga that he has lost all his family at the end of the war. They used to live in Tokyo but his wife was so fearful that they moved to Hiroshima where she thought they would be safer.
Col. Suga is arrested by Australian soldiers and the Keith family finally reunites.

Tags: violence, cruelty, murder, romantic

Review:
Good performances and scripting enhance this tale of hardship and endurance set in a Japanese internment camp in Borneo during World War II.
Considering that this film was released only five years after the end of World War II, when anti-Japanese feeling was still very much present in the U.S., it's surprising that the horrors of life in Japanese captivity aren't played up more.
Several instances of casual and calculated brutality are shown, but there is little here to compare with the shocking (and realistic) scenes in the much more recent film "Paradise Road." And the range of characterizations among the Japanese should be a welcome surprise to those who dismiss wartime and postwar American attitudes as uniformly jingoistic and racist.
Sadly, there were few men like Col. Suga in the real Borneo camps.One unfortunate oversight: the action of the film covers almost four years of imprisonment and deprivation, but the prisoners appear just about as well-fed and energetic at the end as when they arrived..
This movie probably could not have been made during the war or immediately afterwards because although the Japanese are definitely bad in the film, they are not one-dimensional and Sessue Hayakawa plays a Japanese Commandant that is believable and not 100% wicked or sex-crazed.
In THREE CAME HOME she plays Agnes Keith, an American author married to a British colonial officer (Patrick Knowles) living in Borneo.
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.
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.
Perhaps this is simply an accident of the narrative being based on true events.*the main character is a woman who is educated, brave and yet sympathizes with Asian culture (she is a scholar who has published an anthropological study which had been translated into Japanese) even if she vehemently opposes Japan's aggression.*Hiroshima and the firebombings of Tokyo are presented from the Japanese viewpoint as horrific events and their effect in this movie is to engender sympathy for the ambiguous figure of the camp commander.Of course this is still a Hollywood movie of the 50s and some of the behavior seems stilted and implausible to contemporary audiences.
I highly recommend it to others (which is why I bothered to write this!) as a date movie (in spite of the subject matter the strong female character and love story recommend it here) or a film to show children over ten (get a map so the child can locate Borneo) to introduce them to the many moral and political questions arising out of the war in the Pacific.
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.
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.
My only problem with the film is the fact that Claudette is confined to a Japanese prison camp for several years, but maintains her hairdo throughout!.
This is a true story, exterior scenes were photographed wherever possible in Borneo in the exact locales associated with the event as related by Mrs Keith (Claudette Colbert) , an American married to a British administrator (Patrick Knowles).
It's a taut psychological drama about physical and emotional survival focusing on the tensions between Claudette Colbert , soldiers and camp commander well played by Sessue Hayakawa as cultured officer.
Rating : Above average , worthwhile watching .Other film about women on concentration camps mistreated by Japanese military during WWII are the following : ¨Women on valor¨(1986) by Buzz Kulik with Susan Sarandon , Kristy McNichol and Alberta Watson set in Philippines and ¨Paradise road¨(1997) by Bruce Beresford with Glenn Close , Julianna Margulies and Frances McDormand , set in Singapur..
Always enjoyed the great acting of Claudette Colbert,(Tomorrrow Is Forever",'46 and especially her role in this picture as Agnes Keith, who is captured along with her husband and son in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during WW II and towards its Victory.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Claudette Colbert plays British-American civilian POW Agnes Keith in this true story about a mother's experience in a Japanese POW camp in the South Pacific during world war two.
Colbert is phenomenal and is given strong support by the excellent Sessue Hayakawa (Bridge on the River Kwai) as the Colonel assigned to overseeing the camp.The film presents its subject matter in a surprisingly non-propagandistic manner, and does not demonize the Japanese as thoroughly as many war-era films.
In fact, Three Came Home offers some hope for future friendship and alliance between the former combatants.Director Jean Negulesco enjoyed a 55 year career in and out of Hollywood and is probably best known for Three Coins in a Fountain and Johnny Belinda.
Three Came Home is a unique and distinguished motion picture, unique in its intelligent, understated direction by the Rumanian Jean Negulesco, distinguished by the stunning performances of Claudette Colbert and Sessue Hayakawa.
In Three Came Home he adopted the spareness of the Fox lot's production values- no gloss- to invoke the harshness and deprivation of a Japanese internment camp for women during World War II.
I liked the scene of the character played by Colbert (on whose memoir the film is based) searching in the night darkness for her quarters before being caught by the prison camp guards.
Three Came Home was a brave film to make for its time due to its balanced perspective of two cultures represented by two main characters, showing the inhumane and human sides of war.
Claudette Colbert stars in "Three Came Home," a 1950 WW II drama also starring Sessue Hayakawa and Patrick Knowles.
It's the true story of Agnes Keith, who endured almost four years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Sandakan, Borneo with her little son when the Japanese marched into Borneo in 1942.Unlike many Hollywood WW II films, this one is fairly unrelenting in its depiction of beatings, shootings, attempted rape, going through the garbage for food, malaria, and, in the case of these women, many of them not knowing what happened to their husbands.
Their son George was an infant, having been born in 1940.In real life, Keith was criticized for being "too polite" to the guards, by an older woman in the camp - this is alluded to in the film.
Sadly, because of her age - 43 when this film was released - "Three Came Home" was actually her last lead in a major film.After the war, the Keiths had another child, a girl; Agnes died in 1982 at the age of 80, and Harry died the same year.
The performances are on the mark, including Colbert's and that of Patric Knowles (an under-rated actor) as her husband, and the remarkable Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa.
This is really an unusual and very good film about women interned in the Far East (Sumatra not Japan as stated before.)  It is the same camp as in Paradise Road and as in any war, each participant had their own perspective.
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.
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"..
For someone who has to endure harsh punishment over a five-year period in a Japanese prison camp, CLAUDETTE COLBERT looks remarkably well-groomed and coiffed with her trademark hairdo looking as though she had barely missed an appointment at the local beauty parlor.
True, she throws a little mud on her face for the grim moments, but she presents such a typically Claudette look (as Agnes Newton Keith), that it's one of the major weaknesses in an otherwise rather gripping story.She and her little boy are separated from her husband (PATRIC KNOWLES) for most of the film but happily reunited at the end.
Based on the real-life experiences of Keith as a POW, it's told at a rather slow pace as it unfolds a series of scenes meant to indicate the harsh punishment while at the same time showing how Miss Keith communicated on an intellectual level with the Camp Commander SESSUE HAYAKAWA with whom she developed a remarkable rapport.The post-World War II drama unfolds in a Japanese prison camp in Borneo where the cultured Hayakawa takes an interest in authoress Colbert and eases some of her discomfort by complying with certain requests.
I have seen Claudette Colbert in other films - two with John Wayne - which were very enjoyable comedies -and she is a sensitive actress and quite watchable.This portrayal of life in a Japanese concentration camp was lacking the kind of realism seen in the film, A town like Alice.No doubt in the 1950s - pre-Psycho, Edward Scissorhands, and, The Exorcist, it would have been contrary to good public taste and the then filmographic aesthetic to have portrayed the violence and degradation more graphically.
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.
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.
Agnes Newton Keith's memoir about prisoners-of-war during WWII becomes emotional, if somewhat overly-familiar saga starring Claudette Colbert as a female writer who, along with her young son, is taken from Borneo into a prison camp run by the Japanese in 1942.
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.
Three Came Home is based on the true story of Agnes Keith, her husband and her young son.
Three Came Home is one of the first tellings life in a Japanese camp, but not the best.
Of course in 1950, with a communist scare running through the United States, and the war still a vivid memory for everyone,  that might be a bit much to expect.Three Came Home is is only worth catching if you happen to be a fan of Claudette Colbert.
I heaved a sigh of relief when the family was liberated at the end of the picture.Although both films deal with Japanese prisoner of war camps they couldn't be more different.
This war film shows the contrasting differences of brutality and humanity the Japanese Armed Forces was known for and is unique and horrific to see at times.
Claudette Colbert gives yet another shining performance as a WWII POW in THREE CAME HOME.
106 minutes.Agnes Newton Keith's autobiographical novel of her experiences in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in British North Borneo 1941-1945 was first published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and then reprinted in The Reader's Digest before publication in book form by Little, Brown & Co. Sales of the book had already passed the half-million mark in the United States before the film version was released.SYNOPSIS: Sandakan, British North Borneo, 1941.
An American woman (Claudette Colbert) is separated from her husband (Patric Knowles) by a sympathetic but somewhat inflexible Japanese commander (Sessue Hayakawa).NOTES: Although the studio went to a great deal of trouble to emphasize that Three Came Home was entirely photographed on the studio back-lots and sound stages, many critics were seduced by the high level of technical expertise and craftsmanship involved into thinking that the film was lensed - at least in part - on actual location in Borneo.
It's generally acknowledged that the film is a toned down version of the book, which is probably a toned down version of the horrible realities of life in a Japanese POW/civilian prison camp.
that the real Mrs. Keith suffered during the latter part of her internment.The screen play is pretty straight forward in telling how the few westerners residing in the capital city of British North Borneo(present Sabah) were initially interned on a nearby island by the invading Japanese, shortly after Pearl Harbor, and spent the rest of the war in this or other internment camps.
I don't know what Year Agnes Keith published her account of her time as a prisoner-of-war in Borneo but it's reasonable to suppose that she was influenced by Nevil Shute's best-seller A Town Like Alice which appeared in 1948.
Long before the first Holocause movie or the German prison camp classic "Stalag 13" (or TV's "Hogan's Heroes") came this film documenting the horrors of a Japanese detention camp, actually several, as European residents (and one American) of Borneo are forced out of their homes by the invading Japanese and separated into two camps-one for women and children, the other for husbands.
This concentrates mainly on the women's camp, here a real-life survivor who told her own story in book form and soon after saw it adapted for the screen.Claudette Colbert plays Agnes Newton Keith, the courageous woman who stood up to Japanese brutality and almost paid for it with her life.
The film hits its emotional high when Hayakawa reveals to her the fate of his family who moved from Tokyo to Hiroshima to disastrous results.As great as Colbert is, she never looses her movie star good looks while the other women around her look as if they've been beaten by the life they've been forced into.
*Spoiler/plot- 1950, The experiences of three women in WW2 inside a Japanese prison camp in Borneo, the true story experiences of Agnes Newton Keith.
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.
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.