Review of Three Came Home

I think this is a very interesting film which is a product of its time. Agnes Newton Keith was a prisoner of the Japanese, first at Berhala Island near Sandakan in North Borneo, and then at Batu Lintang camp at Kuching in Sarawak, also on the island of Borneo (NOT Sumatra as someone else stated in one of the other comments - Paradise Road is based on the book White Coolies by Betty Jeffery!). She published a book, Three Came Home, abut her time in the camps in 1946 and this film makes a fair go of following the book without too many nods to Hollywood. Parts of it were filmed on location in Borneo, although the studio parts are very obvious. Claudette Colbert gives a good performance, despite appearing too well-groomed and well-fed (this was before The Method!), and Sessue Hayakawa is excellent.

A couple of notes: some liberties have been taken with the text for dramatic reasons (Keith was not the lone American woman - there were four in the predominantly British and Dutch women's camp) and I would recommend reading her book for greater details. For those interested in the camp, there is also a very good page on Wikipedia about the camp (look under Batu Lintang camp), with web links and a reading list, and there are also pages on Wikipedia about Agnes Newton Keith and Tatsuji Suga as well as all the main actors and writers, production staff, directors etc involved in the film. Well worth finding a bit more about such an interesting period in our history.

Mama Perez 29 August 2007