Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

mark.waltz 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.Claudette Colbert plays Agnes Newton Keith, the courageous woman who stood up to Japanese brutality and almost paid for it with her life. She finds a kinsman of sorts with the camp's very human Japanese commander (Sessue Hayakawa) who admires her for an earlier book she wrote and makes her an occasional confidante. But other Japanese soldiers and guards are obviously envious of this friendship, and make her pay in quite inhuman and degrading ways. The film hits its emotional high when Hayakawa reveals to her the fate of his family who moved from Tokyo to Hiroshima to disastrous results.As great as Colbert is, she never looses her movie star good looks while the other women around her look as if they've been beaten by the life they've been forced into. Colbert's hair style remains impeccable, false eye lashes never slip, and she barely has any dirt on her face even in the most brutal of torture scenes and one where she scoots underneath a fence to meet her husband (Patric Knowles) for just one minute. It is Hayakawa who garners the highest praise, especially in climactic scene where he grieves for his family while giving several American children (including Colbert's son) an impromptu party just before the end of the war. No matter what your feeling towards the Japanese as far as World War II is concerned, you can't help but be touched by his breakdown, especially in light of his kindness to Colbert.The gripping scene between Colbert and Knowles where she risks everything to see him for one minute is another touching scene, as prison guards arrive at the women's bunk house to check on Colbert's son, desperately in need of Quinine. That and other tense scenes will have you on the edge of your seat.

Irie212 "Three Came Home" would be worth seeing for the actual-location footage of Borneo alone, but its qualities only begin there. This is a powerful, praiseworthy movie, and the very reason for its power is -- well, I'd suggest it's something that many fellow IMDb reviewers underestimate: the era it was made.Several reviewers wrote a fairly common remark, especially about black-and-white pictures, in these forums: that this film is "surprisingly good" or "good for its time period." Let's take that idea to its logical conclusion. Was King Lear "good for 1606"? Was Mozart's Requiem "good for 1701"? Are Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon "good for 1942"? No. All ages produce masterpieces as well as plenty of popular entertainments. 1950 had Ozzie & Harriet, but it also delivered All About Eve, The Third Man, Rashomon, and this film. The unfortunate truth is, many people believe that any outstanding work of art that preceded their generation is "surprising." But I rush to add that indeed there was something different fifty years ago, not surprising, but important: Filmmakers showed restraint. Though it is about war, "Three Came Home" generates emotional power with very little staged brutality. There's more carnage in 7 seconds of "Se7en" than in the whole of this war film. Consider: Although it is brief and entirely bloodless, the scene where Claudette Colbert is tortured is almost unbearable.But the greatest strength of this film is its fairness. Although all the brutality is perpetrated by the Japanese occupiers, they aren't villains. We come to respect the colonel played by the magnificent Sessue Hayakawa. In fact, when his character talks about his son's death at home-- and then says it happened at Hiroshima — it's another breathtakingly powerful moment, and our sympathy is immediately with him. As Colbert's character says to him, "Whatever the rest is, there's no difference in our hearts about our children."

dougdoepke First-rate production from TCF. The studio's craftsmanship is really in evidence in this atmospheric and moving account of one woman's heroic effort at surviving Japanese internment during WWII. A highly de-glamorized Colbert is simply superb as real-life Britisher Agnes Keith imprisoned on Borneo with her small boy in the early days of the war. Those nightmarish jungle scenes with the wind and the foliage have stayed with me over the years and cast an appropriately unstable mood over the movie as a whole. Credit ace director Jean Negulesco for bringing out the film's strong emotional values without sentimentalizing them. He continues to be an underrated movie-maker from the dynamic studio period.We know from Sessue Hayakawa's cultivated Japanese colonel that Hollywood is changing its perceptions of our former enemy. Cruel stereotypes do continue (presumably based on fact), but the colonel's character is humanized to an unusually sympathetic degree-- even his loss in the recent atomic bombing of Hiroshima is mentioned. Then too, it's well to remember that during the war our government interned US citizens of Japanese extraction in pretty inhospitable camps along the eastern Sierras, and probably illegally so.Anyway, the movie has the look and feel of the real thing, while the producers should be saluted for using as many actual locations as possible. The fidelity shows. Since the story is the thing, the cast appropriately has no stars except for Colbert, which helps produce the realistic effect. There are a number of riveting and well-staged scenes. But the staging of the final crowd re-union scene strikes me as particularly well done. And, of course, there's that final heart-breaking view of the hilltop that still moves me, even 60 years later. All in all, this is the old Hollywood system at its sincere and de-glamorized best.

francisclough Three Came Home is a unique and distinguished motion picture, unique in its intelligent, understated direction by the Rumanian Jean Negulesco, distinguished by the stunning performances of Claudette Colbert and Sessue Hayakawa. Negulesco, who is perhaps best known among film fans for the fifties' crowd-pleasers How to Marry a Millionaire and Three Coins in the Fountain and his masterpiece, Jane Wyman's 1948 Oscar-winner Johnny Belinda, was a director whose style was influenced by the general mies-en-scene, or overall "look" of the studios he worked for. These were Warner Brothers and Twentieth-Century-Fox, respectively. In a Jean Negulesco film one doesn't usually pick out extraordinary camera shots, because the emphasis is on character and atmosphere and how the characters are often so affected by their environment as to be very nearly engulfed by it. This was literally the case with the Joan Crawford character in Negulesco's unforgettable Humoresque. In Three Came Home he adopted the spareness of the Fox lot's production values- no gloss- to invoke the harshness and deprivation of a Japanese internment camp for women during World War II. Negulesco's pacing and emotional truth make every scene decidedly devoid of melodrama. I liked the scene of the character played by Colbert (on whose memoir the film is based) searching in the night darkness for her quarters before being caught by the prison camp guards. Absolutely harrowing and poignant at the same time, and the scene's wrap-up is emotionally and overpoweringly satisfying. As is the entire picture. Claudette Colbert (like her contemporaries Greer Garson, Deborah Kerr, Dorothy McGuire, Jean Simmons) was a great female star who evoked her own natural warmth and friendliness through her roles. Primarily remembered for her charming comedic performances (It Happened One Night, Midnight, The Egg and I chief among them) she grew into a dramatic actress of power far and above sincerity and star magnetism. Never was she more real and on-the-mark than in her portrayal of Agnes Keith in Three Came Home. Her scenes with Sessue Hayakawa (superb as a powerless, conscience-stricken Japanese commander) are wonderful, as are the scenes with (precious) Mark Keuning as her little son and the finale. Three Came Home was a brave film to make for its time due to its balanced perspective of two cultures represented by two main characters, showing the inhumane and human sides of war. It failed at the box office though critically acclaimed. It should be seen and appreciated as a film testament to a time in history, a delineation of the impact of tyranny and intolerance that can still be felt in today's world.