People are voting emotionally.

Lack of good storyline.

I wanted to but couldn't!

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

I don't know what Year Agnes Keith published her account of her time as a prisoner-of-war in Borneo but it's reasonable to suppose that she was influenced by Nevil Shute's best-seller A Town Like Alice which appeared in 1948. Before writing it Shute interviewed a woman who had been captured in Malaya and, with other women and children, spent the rest of the war trudging from camp to camp. Shute was, of course, writing a novel and the actual marching is the central and largest section and it is possible that having read the novel and noted how successful it was Mrs. Keith decided to publish her own memoirs. Three Came Home is a fine film but having read A Town Like Alice and watched the film adaptation, plus the BBC rip-off Tenko it's impossible to avoid the feeling that Three Came Home has been sanitised. In both A Town Like Alice and Tenko the women prisoners quickly lose their beauty parlour appearance and wind up wearing little more than rags as well as losing weight whereas in Three Came Home the women appear to have laundering and ironing facilities on tap to say nothing of manicure and pedicure available at the touch of a bell-push and after three and a half years of imprisonment walk out of the camp as bright-eyed and bushy tailed as the day they entered it. This caveat to one side Claudette Colbert weighs in with arguable the best dramatic performance of her long career.

This P.O.W movie is unusual in that it's set in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp that housed women and children on the island of Borneo and is based on a true story. It's directed, superbly, by Jean Negulesco and it may be his best and most under-valued film. What's most remarkable is that it treats the Japanese with a considerable degree of sympathy, certainly not as heroes but neither as the monsters of other similar pictures.There are a number of superb sequences that build both character and real tension and even the clichés of the prison camp genre are very subtly subverted. It may be no masterpiece but it stands head and shoulders above many more famous films. First-rate performances, too, from Claudette Colbert in the central role of the sole American prisoner and from Sessue Hayakawa, as outstanding here as the camp commandant as he was in "The Bridge on the River Kwai".

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.

Thank God for Fox Movie Channel. Claudette Colbert gives yet another shining performance as a WWII POW in THREE CAME HOME. The Japanese intern her, her son and husband from 1941 until war's end. Based on a real account by a published author of the time, the movie is pretty gritty for 1950, and includes a reasonably realistic attempted rape and some 1950s-style beatings, which means no blood and no real "contact" as various female POWs are slapped around and kicked while they're down. The legendary Sessue Hayakawa plays a colonel who befriends Colbert's educated and compassionate character, and he lives to lose his entire family in the flames of Hiroshima while she is reunited with hers at the end -- hence the title. Shot in decent quality B&W. While the Japanese overlords other than Hayakawa are depicted as brutal, they are not the drooling, ravenous, bucktoothed sadists of a typical WWII-era movie (and which they were probably like in real life). Most of the cast is British, although the film is a Hollywood job, albeit shot overseas for a better sense of authenticity. Suggested for all those who like a good character study, which is what this movie is all about.