Three Came Home

Colonel Suga says he attended the University of Washington for four years and Agnes reveals that she attended Berkeley.

Suga goes on to say that Cal "murdered" Washington's football team.

However, Tatsugi Suga arrived at Washington in 1924 and during the next four seasons California never defeated Washington.

Only one football game would fit Suga's descriptiona 33-0 loss in 1933.

The Ford Prefect shown in one of the opening scenes is a postwar model.

I was first introduced to Claudette Colbert as a young child who was privileged to grow up within range of WOR-TV in New York City and its "Million Dollar Movie", which ran the same classic film every night for an entire week during the late 1950's and early 60's. The film was not the wildly popular comedy "It Happened One Night" but rather the drama "Since You Went Away", which depicts the story of a Midwestern family struggling on the home front during the darkest days of World War II while the man of the house is away fighting on the battlefield.

During WWII a family stationed in Borneo is captured by the Japanese and struggle to survive in brutal POW camp in the Far East. 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).

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.

This is a rather remarkable film because it is a basically true story, and much of it was filmed in locales where it actually took place.Made in 1950, it is rather faithfully based on the memoirs of Agnes Newton Keith.

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. In précis it looks pretty ominous.

Claudette Colbert gives an outstanding performance in this very realistic piece on internment during WW2. The conditions of the camp, although not as bad as those portrayed in other WW2 prison camp films, is, nonetheless, extremely challenging, especially when one has to take care of a small child at the same time one is trying to survive.

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. Instead, this is a compelling true story of a woman who is interred in a camp for the duration of the war and her relationship with the commandant.

I watched this film today on the More 4 Channel. This channel has to its credit been showing various films recently from the 40s and 50s and this week it seems to be concentrating on the lesser known war films.

Claudette Colbert plays Agnes Keith, prisoner. The time period is WWII.