The story of Claudette Colbert, her husband Patrick Knowles, and their young child during the Japanese occupation of Borneo shortly after Pearl Harbor in 1941. In précis it looks pretty ominous. The brutal Japanese, the sobbing women, the starving children, the constant insults and beatings. And this is, after all, 1950, probably written and shot mostly in 1949, with the war a short four years behind. It was less than a decade earlier that the war-time movies had been calling the Japanese "bandy legged monkeys" (Robert Taylor in "Bataan") and calling for them to be "wiped off the face of the earth" (Henry Hull in "Objective Burma.").
Well, the authoress of the book this is based on can be glad she wasn't a Chinese woman when the Japanese occupied Nanking in China, true enough, but this film is more nuanced than any other I can think of from the period. It's, well, it's credible. Japanese prison camps were much harder on prisoners than the German Stalags. The Japanese were equally hard on their own warriors. The aviation cadets at Etajima endured a long and strenuous training program and were beaten routinely with sticks for errors. Late in the war, officers on Chichi Jima ate the liver of decomposing American corpses. Not that they enjoyed it; they were half drunk before they could bring themselves to do it. It was a demonstration to the men that even the most disgusting acts could be overcome with courage.
At any rate, the Japanese, let by Colonel Sesue Hayakawa, separated men and women into different camps but nobody ate any livers. The Japanese guards followed orders implicitly, and when Hayakawa was absent, one of them rapes Colbert and later twists her arm brutally to get her to sign a fake admission. But they're not the raving maniacs of "Purple Heart." And Hayakawa is a horse of a different color; a nice guy, literate, understanding, a graduate of the University of Washington, who enjoys children and grieves when three of his own are killed in Hiroshima.
It's rather surprising to find the Japanese being treated so evenly in a film from the 1950s. They're not "good" but they're not "bandy legged monkeys" either. They're just believable.
Hayakawa delivers a fine subdued performance and it's certainly Colbert's most notable dramatic role. It's worth catching -- an adult movie about the war, when most of Western cinema was just recovering from a long spell of enmity.
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