Directed by Jean Negulesco
Cast: Claudette Colbert, Patric Knowles, Florence Desmond, Sessue Hayakawa

The setting for this WWII prison camp film is the Japanese occupied jungles of Burma. You may recall from your history class or the Food Network that Northern Burma was established as a British protectorate in 1882 and expanded in 1888. Claudette Colbert portrays writer Agnes Newton Keith who’s husband Harry (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man’s Patric Knowles) was a British Conservator of Forests and Director of Agriculture. After soldiers separate the couple, the film follows Newton’s imprisonment with her young son during the years of 1942-45. Luckily for her, Col. Suga (Sessue Hayakawa best known as Col. Saito in The Bridge Over the River Kwai) the commander of the prisons in the occupied area is a fan of her book Land Below the Wind about the Sandakan area of Borneo.

This allows a civil acquaintanceship that opens a little dialogue with one of her captors. Her imprisonment has it’s hardships with starvation, minor humiliation (on the level of wedgies and grundees) and an attempted rape that leads to a rough coercement attempt by a brutal prison head. Overall it isn’t depicted as being as harsh as some of the South Georgia jails I’ve been in. The opening narration is pretty ethnocentric but the script surprisingly backs off from becoming your usual McCarthy era white boy bullshit. Most of the humane elements are relegated to Col. Suga. The funniest sterotypes are a bunch of horny loud mouthed Aussie P.O.W.’s trying to hook up with the women through a barbed wire fence. These dame deprived dudes who can’t make out the gals through the dark Borneo night don’t even hesitate to climb the fence even with the uninterested women claiming to be 70! Their loud hormone induced behavior is more American redneck than any Australian I’ve ever met. This scene leads to the best shot in the film when the trouser droppers are machine gunned off the fence with some impressive early squib work. Something I wasn’t expecting from a big budget studio production. There is another impressive dark moment when Col. Suga abducts three small children after learning his family was vaporized in Hiroshima. The only problem I had with Three Came Home was the dramatic ability of Claudette Colbert. I enjoyed her comedic role in Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, but here she acts with the subtly of a jackhammer in a dentist office.

So bad in fact, one sequence has her giant fake eyebrows crawling through the jungle flailing around like a five year old being dragged away from a ice cream counter. It’s so surreal that I thought it may have been directed by Tex Avery. She flips, flops, moans, cries, whispers and yells. It’s hilarious. During filming, Colbert sustained a back injury that forced her to give up the part of Margo Channing in All About Eve to Bette Davis. I have a feeling it occurred during this goofball performance. The film is based on Agnes Newton Keith’s book of the same name. Since writing was against camp rules, she would keep notes on scraps of paper and bury them in tin cans. For those who went to American Public shools, Northern Borneo, the third largest island on earth, is now Malaysia and is also the setting for the W.I.P. film Paradise Road (1997). The other 70% of Borneo is now Indonesia. 20th Century Fox would later make Seven Women from Hell (1961). A much more exploitive female prison camp flick with the Japanese occupied area switching to the Philippines.