Prisonnières des Japonais

Over 100 US Army and Navy nurses stationed in the Philippines from 1942-1945 are incarcerated by the Japanese. Fictionalized account of history is ambitious, occasionally gripping, yet awfully familiar. It could have been the inspiration for TV's "China Beach", though the teleplay by Jonas McCord (with modern dialogue) doesn't have that show's canny wit. Performances by Susan Sarandon, Kristy McNichol, Valerie Mahaffey and Terry O'Quinn are all solid under the obviously strenuous circumstances. Television veteran Buzz Kulik directs efficiently with textbook concentration and sincerity, but no flair. ** from ****

The tale of American army and navy nurses who are prisoners during the Japanese occupation of the Phillipines in the second world war. Kristy McNichol appears in the Bataan Death March, as one of gender disorientation, since her killing of a Japanese soldier makes the others assume she is a boy. In a memorable scene McNichol and Susan Sarandon slug it out as a form of self-punishment for the gratification of the guards. McNichol's role is supportive to Sarandon who is the star, but she brings her usual tomboyish spunkiness to proceedings. The teleplay by Jonas McCord rationalises the Japanese's brand of cruelty with the idea that they do not believe in surrender. They would rather suicide than be shamed in the way they believe the women have allowed themselves to be, and therefore the Japanese think the prisoners deserve no kindness. However not every guard enacts this philosophy, with one noticeably friendly to one woman who falls pregnant, and the commander being an American-Japanese, having being raised in San Francisco, makes him more amenable to Sarandon's requests for mercy. The treatment is narrated by Sarandon, at a post-war hearing, so we know she will survive the camp, but it does not answer the question of why the Americans left the Phillipines so quickly once they declared war on Japan. The idea that they are not aware that any Americans have remained in the area is raised at the camp's liberation, but clearly sentiment is against Douglas MacArthur when he announces his withdrawal. Director Buzz Kulik uses black and white newsreel footage and matching decoloured recreations for the progression of the war.

If you like the classics Three Came Home and A Town Called Alice, you might want to watch the more modern version Women of Valor. Starring Susan Sarandon, it follows a group of Army nurses who refuse to evacuate from their station in the Philippines and get imprisoned by Japanese soldiers. There's a variety of characters, from the meek to the bold, but nothing about this version really stands out from the original 1950 drama. It's very, very similar to Three Came Home. There's an attempted rape, scrambling for food, a sympathetic Japanese colonel, and one of the women sneaks out to meet her husband at the separate men's camp. Sarandon fans can check it out, but there's no comparison to Claudette Colbert's award-winning performance.

Incidentally, Sarandon was the only woman in the cast brave enough not to shave her armpits (you can catch her bold choice again in White Palace) - which I loved. POWs were not given razors! It's about time women were shown to be grungy, braless, sweaty, filthy, and without makeup or hair products (I guess Kristy McNichol had a natural shaggy 'do). It almost makes up for Alberta Watson's reason for almost missing the evacuation bus: she had to put on a lacy black negligee. I'm not kidding. She couldn't just grab it and stuff it in her suitcase (or God forbid, leave it behind when her life is at stake). She had to give a dramatic reveal to her fellow nurses as to why they all almost were killed. Had I been one of the supporting characters, I probably would have pushed her off the bus.

This movie acts as though it is a true story. However, the only truth about it is that there were some US Army nurses captured and imprisoned by the Japanese in the Philapines; and that these women were not given the recognition or the medals that they deserved.

The true story is a fascinating, adventure filled, tale of heroism and triumph over adversity. It has elements of discrimination in the awards given (or not) because the protagonists are women. The true story is one of bravery, valour, patriotism, adversity and sacrifice. While these elements can be found in the film, they are ascribed to utterly fictitious events and people.

It is therefore a huge shame that the writers could not be bothered to research the truth and instead make up characters and events which are presumably based on their own prejudicial ideas of what women would face in a Japanese POW camp. If you want to learn something of the actual truth, a search on "The Angels of Bataan" or "The Battling Belles of Bataan" will give you a good start.

Once you get past the the fact that this film is doing history a grave dis-service, the film is enjoyable enough. The women remain beautiful and made-up despite the deprivation, The acting is excellent and keeps the viewer interested. The story is well timed. As a pure piece of entertainment, it does the job.

Traditional World War II movies were not common in the eighties, but "Women of Valor" is one of the few exceptions. ("The Big Red One" and "Memphis Belle" are others). Films about life in wartime prisoner-of-war camps ("The Colditz Story", "Bridge on the River Kwai", "The Wooden Horse", "The Great Escape", "King Rat", etc.) had been popular in the fifties and sixties, but the genre declined in popularity after that, with the semi-comic "Escape to Athena" being a rare example from the late seventies. What makes "Women of Valor" different, of course, is that the prisoners are female rather than male, although the film-makers may have been influenced by the British TV series "Tenko" which ran between 1981 and 1984 and also dealt with the experiences of women captured by the Japanese during the war.

The story of "Women of Valor" is told using a "framework technique". The opening and closing scenes show Lt Margaret Jessup, a senior army nurse, giving evidence to a United States Congressional subcommittee about her experiences as a POW in the Philippines between 1942 and 1945. The remaining part of the film shows what Lt Jessup and her fellow nurses went through during their internment in the camp.

One thing which surprised me about the film was how anti-Japanese it was. "Bridge on the River Kwai", made thirty years earlier, little more than a decade after the end of the war itself, takes a much more balanced view, with a certain respect growing up between the British Colonel Nicholson and his captor Colonel Saito. Here, however, the Japanese soldiers are simply shown as ugly, brutal little men who delight in tormenting their captives. (There was a lot of anti-Japanese feeling in America during the eighties, mostly rooted in trade rivalry, and I wondered if this might have had something to do with the way the Japanese are portrayed here). Only their commandant, Captain Nakayama, seems capable of showing any humanity, something the film attributes to his having grown up in San Francisco, and as despite his American upbringing he still believes implicitly in the code of Bushido and the divinity of the Emperor there is a limit even to Nakayama's liberalism. (It is, in fact, doubtful whether the idea of the Japanese worshipping their Emperor as a living god was ever more than a Western misunderstanding- or fabrication- but the film does not delve too deeply into Shinto theology).

The film is generally a fairly dull one, repeating all the standard prisoner-of-war situations familiar from the movies listed above and others without adding very much that is new. Merely changing the sex of the prisoners does not really amount to originality. There is no real attempt to develop the personalities of the various nurses and none of them emerge as memorable individuals. The one character who is given more individuality is, oddly enough, Nakayama, whose American background and greater sense of decency set him apart from the other Japanese. The film does much to show just why the war film went into a decline in the years after 1970. A loss of American patriotism and self-confidence after the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate was only part of the reason; by the Reagan years of the mid-eighties America had largely recovered those qualities. A more important reason was that so many war films had been made that it was becoming increasingly difficult to say anything fresh about the conflict. "Women of Valor" certainly does not do so. 4/10