Ma vie commence en Malaisie

I remember my mother and my aunt watching this film when I was a little boy late once night when it came on television.

They seemed to have cried most of the way through the film. This is an image that sticks in my mind whenever this film is mentioned.

Years later my mother told me how she lost some relatives in the second world war as they tried to escape from the Japanese in Burma by trying to walk it to India. They apparently died of exhaustion

A Town Like Alice adapted from the novel by Nevile Shute looks at a group of women as they shuffle from one Japanese camp to another during occupied Malaysia but no one would take them in. Slowly one by one they perish because of malnutrition, sickness, disease or exhaustion.

During their journey they are accompanied by an old guard who slowly comes to respect them.

During the journey Virginia McKenna meets Australian soldier Peter Finch also a prisoner of war but he does his best to help them out here and there and both fall for each other. However he faces severe punishment when he is found out for stealing some chickens.

The film is told in flashback as McKenna goes back to Malaysia after the war and discovers what happened to Finch.

This is a gritty and unromanticised view of life in occupied Far East, many years before films like Empire of the Sun. Also it is unusual for not being set in a prisoner of war camp, these people want to get there and stay there.

It was filmed in Malaysia and Australia for added authenticity.

Look out for Jean Anderson, many years later she appeared in the BBC television series Tenko which was also women held in a prisoner of war camp in Malaysia.

A Town Like Alice (1956)

A remarkable movie, completely under everyone's radar, about a group of English women in Asia during World War II. They suffer under the hands of the Japanese not as prisoners, quite, but as refugees caught between captors. Having nowhere to go and no one to protect them, they end up walking and walking, through jungle and no-man's land, past actual POW camps and through native villages, until gradually they start to die from the hardship.

Mixed into this really vivid and heartbreaking drama is a love affair between a passing Australian soldier and one of the women. The man is a prisoner of the Japanese who seems to have some freedom because he can fix things for them, and he crosses paths with the women a few times over the years.

Years, yes. The movie moves quickly through a long period of war. This is the real war for most people, the occupation by the Japanese and their arrogance, and the patience and impotence of ordinary people. It is told with alarming frankness. I mean, it's still a movie from the 1950s, not a documentary, but the plainness of the actors, the relatively low budget of the film, and the location shooting all make for a convincing final product. It's amazing, at times, and heartwarming as much as heartwrenching. There is even the one terribly good Japanese soldier trapped by the same bigger circumstance of a war that was not his doing.

The one known actor here is Peter Finch, who is marvelous, even though his role is limited. He is meant to be a bright spot in the life of this woman, and he is wonderfully bright and cheerful (a true Aussie stereotype that we all love).

The book that inspired the movie is widely regarded to this day, and was written by Nevil Shute, who heard about a group of Dutch (not English) women shuttled about by the Japanese in Dutch Malaysia during the war. It turns out that they were not usually made to walk, but Shute's misunderstanding of the story led to the main drama of the book and later movie. The crucifixion of prisoners by Japanese soldiers (shown in the movie) is substantiated, however, and it's a gruesome final turn of events for the plot.

There are few movies of this post-war period that really deal with ordinary suffering by ordinary people in Asia during the war (the suffering of civilians in Europe or Britain is fully shown, by contrast). This one does it well, very well. A wonderful surprise.

I suppose that it should be confessed at the outset that I had the hots for Ms McEnna in her youth. Nevertheless, I still think that this is an excellent movie of the 1950's war genre.

Ginny and Peter Finch provide typically understated performances that are reminiscent of 'Ice Cold In Alex' and 'The Cruel Sea'. Solid, sterling, stiff-upper-lip-stuff that has no place in the spineless, simpering, metro-sexual third millennium.

I have never read Shute's novel, so I cannot comment on what liberties have been taken, but viewed without prejudice as a movie outlining Japanese brutality and human endurance it is still a well-realised piece of work. Everyone gives a thoroughly believable turn, both Caucasian and Oriental alike, as Ms McEnna's character concludes 'you can't really hate anyone' in the end. Though the Japanese - like their Nazi counterparts - did their very best to merit it.

Ms McKenna leads a group of unwanted western women and children, for whom no Japanese officer wants responsibility. So; they get shunted from one place to another, on foot, inadequately fed, and without medical assistance. Inevitably; they begin dying. Finch plays a captured Aussie running trucks for the Japanese. Filmed in black-&-white, in Britain and on location, it offers a very believable turn upon the miasmic swamps, crippling heat, humidity and deluging rain.

Of course, it's a love story too. And here again Ginny and Peter play their parts to perfection. I defy any true romantic not to be rendered lachrymose by her realisation of his survival and their final meeting at the end. Her hasty, last-minute application of cosmetics is particularly touching and well-observed. As if he'd care a hoot one way or the other.

It's a great old feel-good movie for the austerity generation. I give it nine stars and good luck to 'em all I say.

The Rank Organisation went whole hog in producing A Town Like Alice with location shooting in Malaya, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The results were well worth the effort and the film was a big boost to the careers of Peter Finch and Virginia McKenna. In fact as Finch was becoming more and more an international star he would get fewer roles like this one, playing a native Australian.

I was expecting when deciding to view this film that it would be similar in nature to the American film Three Came Home that starred Claudette Colbert as a woman prisoner of the Japanese in World War II. The woman prisoners were segregated, but quickly housed and fended for themselves as best they could, but in a static setting.

When the male prisoners are separated from the females after the fall of Malaya, these woman are put under guard and just sent around like vagabonds with their children if they had them. Why they were selected for this rather special brand of torture we can speculate on end, but whatever the Japanese idea of chivalry was to the women, they couldn't just outright kill them. In fact none are during this film.

The film is seen through McKenna's eyes, she's working as a secretary in Kuala Lampur when the Japanese takeover. She takes over too as guardian of her boss's kids after their mother dies early on in the strange odyssey. Peter Finch plays an Australian soldier who with his mates they constantly run into and who offers them help when he can sneak food and medicine from the Japanese. He pays a heavy price for doing this when he's caught.

When he was killed by Irish Terrorists in 1979, it was learned that Lord Mountbatten had specifically requested that at his funeral no representation from the Japanese was to be permitted. As Supreme Commander of that theater Mountbatten remembered all the horror stories he heard from people survived Japanese internment, even the strange internment where apparently the whole country was their jail.

How McKenna and those that remained survived is quite a story, let's say it involved breaking a lot of cultural barriers to do it. One of the women who did it her own way was Maureen Swanson who after McKenna refuses his proposition, she takes up with a Japanese captain. Swanson is another you'll remember from A Town Like Alice.

Alice refers to Alice Springs in Northern Territory where Finch reminisces he'd like to return. It sounds like heaven, looks pretty good too after the years in Malaya. The film is a really good war film from the not often heard from point of view of woman prisoners.

A Town Like Alice is now an old film. However it has a certain directness and freshness which makes it quite watchable.

A Town like Alice is the story of an English nurse, who is trapped in Malaya with a group of Englihs women during the Japanese invasion. As the group can't be categorised by the Japanese army into a useful pigeonhole, they are forced to walk from city to city looking for a place to be prisoners-of-war.

The story is a strong one and the movie doesn't let the book down. Shot in excellent locations in Malaysia, the only problems are fitting the breadth of the story into a limited time.