Three Came Home

TCM is showing several movies about the Asian theater of World War II tonight, kicking off with Three Came Home, at 8:00 PM ET.

Claudette Colbert plays Agnes Newton, an American writer married to Harry Keith (played by Patric Knowles), a British worker at one of the rubber plantations in Malaya. World War II comes and the Japanese, in their drive to take over as much of Asia as they can for the raw materials they need, push into British Malaya. They take over the British holdings, and immediately put everybody into concentration camps, separating the men and the women.

Japanese concentration camp conditions were pretty bad, but even worse for somebody like Newton who had a young child. She's also highly fortunate to have Sessue Hayakawa as her prison camp commander. He can speak English, and had read some of her books, and so has some sympathy towards her. That's not to say that she had it easy though. And certainly, nobody else had it easy. The movie is based on the real life Agnes Newton Keith's story.

For whatever reason, Three Came Home is a fairly overlooked movie, but it's really not a bad one. It apparently made its way to public domain, and so has been released to DVD, as well.