Three Came Home

A pleasant surprise, Three Came Home (1950) is an honest and affecting prisoner-of-war film. Director Jean Negulesco paints a sober portrait of life in a Japanese "woman's camp" during WWII, with a superb Claudette Colbert performance at the center.

Novellist Agnes Newton Keith (Claudette Colbert) is the wife of a British official (Patric Knowles) in the Far East. When war comes, the Japanese Army quickly overruns their settlement and Agnes and son George (Mark Keuning) are separate from husband Harry. Agnes endures the often-cruel treatment of the guards through pluck and perservance, and she's helped more than once by the likeable Colonel Suga (Sessue Hayakawa), a fan of her work. But Agnes gets into trouble when she accuses a guard of attempted rape, and as the war drags on her oft-sickly son struggles to survive.

Many films have been made about Japan's internment of Allied civilians (Empire of the Sun, Paradise Road) but few with the power and dramatic impact of Three Came Home. The usual POW dilemmas (cruel guards, low supplies, tension with bunk mates) are amplified by Agnes's civilian status: doubly agonized by the fate of their missing, also-interned husbands, Agnes and her colleagues suffer doubly, and their gender makes them a target for other abuses. The Japanese are an interesting cross-section of types, from the crude, murderous camp guards to the educated Colonel, but it's still a cruel and rotten system as evidenced by the reaction to Agnes's rape accusation.

Three Came Home is in many ways a "woman's picture," with its female lead and the family drama at the center, but it's still more brutally honest than most POW films from Grand Illusion onward. Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 (1953) borders on bad taste in its comic treatment of a Nazi prison camp, and even the mostly-serious Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) soft-pedals Japanese atrocities. A key sequence, where an ogling session by Australian POWs comes to a shocking conclusion, is almost a rebuke to a parallel scene (played for laughs) in Stalag 17. A surprisingly-nasty torture scene also factors in later on. Neguelesco perfectly captures the desperation and intolerable uncertainty of the situation, and the conclusion has genuine emotional impact.

Claudette Colbert's superb performance is a real treat. Colbert wonderfully plays down her usual persona; her Agnes is certainly strong-willed, but driven more by a grim determination to survive rather than ideals or self-righteousness. The rest of the cast is fairly non-descript, save Sessue Hayakawa, rehearsing his Bridge on the River Kwai part as a sympathetic commandant.

Three Came Home is a solid POW film and it comes highly recommend. For its honesty and its superb lead performance, it's an underseen winner.