Three Came Home (1950)
Director:
Jean Negulesco
Tagline:
« The story of one woman’s confinement in a WW II Japanese prison camp »
Actors:
Agnes Newton Keith
Harry Keith
Betty Sommers
Colonel Michio Suga
Henrietta Thomas
Rating:
(2’427 votes)
(2’427 votes)
Quotes:
[first lines]
« Agnes Newton Keith: Six-degrees north of the Equator, in the heart of the East Indies, lies Sandakan, the tiny capital of British North Borneo. In Sandakan in 1941, there were 15 thousand Asiatics, 79 Europeans, and 1 American. I was the American. My name is Agnes Keith. I was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. My husband is Harry Keith, a colonial official of British North Borneo. Borneo became my home when Harry and I were married. And it was in Sandakan that I bore one child, and lost another. And it was in Sandakan that we waited – 45 white men, 24 wives, and 11 children – through the anxious days of 1940 and '41. Certain only of one thing: that sooner or later, Japanese guns would join in the thunders of war, and Japanese troops would come down through the East Indies. The men waited because it was their duty; the women because it was their choice.
»
« Dr. Bandy: I wonder what I did with that dress? That's what I'll do this very night, by George. I'll dig out that dress and try it on.
»
« Henrietta Thomas: I do not care to be beaten because some disgusting woman cannot do without a husband for a few months.
»
Runtime:106 minutes
Plots:
During Word War II, American author Agnes Newton Keith is imprisoned by the Japanese in various POW camps in North Borneo and Sarawak.
The true story of Agnes Newton Keith’s imprisonment in several Japanese prisoner-of-war camps from 1941 to the end of WWII. Separated from her husband and with a young son to care for she has many difficulties to face.
In this docudrama, American author Agnes Newton Keith recounts her time spent in Japanese internment in Borneo during WWII. In 1941, she and her husband, Harry Keith, a colonial British official, had already been living in Sandakan, the capital of British North Borneo, for several years, with their then four year old son Georgie, when they knew the invasion by the Japanese was imminent, that invasion, made all the more clear with the attack on Pearl Harbor, which occurred on December 7, 1941. She, the lone American in a small community of Brits, and the other westerners were at first allowed to live as they had before the invasion, until the Japanese interred them in POW camps, the men separated from the women and children, the two camps separated by only a few hundred meters, thus there being general knowledge between the two camps what was happening as a collective. Things went from bad to worse when the women and children were moved, the ultimate location unknown to their husbands, to another camp on Kuching, a several day sail away. The women had to deal not only with disease, primarily malaria, in the squalid conditions, but brutality by the Japanese guards. The double edge sword for Agnes was being in the good books of Colonel Michio Suga, the head of the camps in Borneo, he a western educated man who appreciated her kind account of East and Southeast Asians in the book she had written and published on life in Borneo. What was arguably worse for her was not knowing anything about Harry, most specifically if he was dead or alive.
