A Town Like Alice

A new-to-me movie that aired during Summer Under the Stars was A Town Like Alice, which aired as part of Peter Finch's day. The movie is available on DVD, so I can do a full-length post on it.

Peter Finch isn't really the star; that honor goes to Virginia McKenna. She plays Jean Paget, a British woman who at the start of the movie wants to go to British Malaya (now Malaysia) to help install a community well for a village. While there, she remembers her past that eventually led her back here....

Flash back to about 1941. That's during World War II, and as you may recall from history or movies like Bridge on the River Kwai or Sea Wife, the Japanese overran quite a bit of Southeast Asia. As the flashback begins, that takeover hasn't happened, but it's about to. Jean works as a secretary in the typing pool, and the pool's boss informs the secretaries that they're about to need to use the emergency preparedness skills they've been told about which were to be used in case they need to flee from the Japanese onslaught right now.

Unfortunately, Jean, her friend, and the friend's family get held up by a few minutes, but those few minutes are enough to make them miss the boat, so they have to drive the 50 or so miles to Singapore in a car that's not going to hold up. They get rescued by the British, but unfortunately the British have to stop when they hear Japanese ahead. Sure enough, the Japanese sho up at the compound where the British hole up, and take everybody prisoner, separating the men and the women.

The women are put under the command of a Japanese sergeant (Kenji Takaki, credited as "Takagi"), who tells the women to march, presumably to Singapore where they'll be interred with all the other women until the end of the war. But things happen, and the women can't get to Singapore. Meanwhile, at one village after another, the Japanese commanders tell them there's not enough supplies to inter women in that particular village, so they'll have to march somewhere else. This goes on for months and months.

Along the way, Jean meets Joe Harman (Peter Finch), an Australian soldier who is a POW but doing some work as a mechanic because it's presumably a valuable service that's keeping him safe. Joe ran a station (a giant cattle ranch) in Australia's Northern Territory, and Joe tells Jean about the nice town of Alice Springs (hence the movie's title) in the middle of the territory.

The women march on, with members of their group dying of exhaustion and tropical illnesses one by one along the way, but cross paths with Joe and the other Aussies on multiple occasions. Will the two be able to survive the war? Joe steals a Japanese commander's chicken to try to feed the women, but that could mean the death of him....

I very much enjoyed A Town Like Alice, as it's the sort of unassuming little movie that generally fits my tastes. McKenna is excellent in an unglamorous role while Finch is good enough in a smaller role. I did find myself questioning why the Japanese wouldn't transport all the women to a prison camp right away, as in Three Came Home, but was able to suspend that disbelief and get involved with the story which is quite good.

Those who think of war movies as action movies may not like A Town Like Alice, but I think everybody else will, and I can highly recommend it.