Drei kehrten heim

Good performances and scripting enhance this tale of hardship and endurance set in a Japanese internment camp in Borneo during World War II. Miss Colbert's performance in particular is always convincing and often riveting. Also noteworthy is Sessue Hayakawa's sensitive portrayal of the outwardly stern but inwardly humane Col. Suga.

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. Yes, some of the Japanese are wantonly cruel, but others are obviously sympathetic to the prisoners, and as noted above, Col. Suga emerges not only as a reasonable commander but also as a noble man who can resist the temptation to take out his own grief and anger on the prisoners. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Claudette Colbert is remembered for her performances in comedy roles, but she was a fine dramatic actress as well. This is by far her best dramatic performance. 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!