francisclough Review of Three Came Home

Three Came Home (1950)

Colbert splendid via Negulesco's sparseness in sublime war film

[10/10 · 27 January 2008]

Three Came Home is a unique and distinguished motion picture, unique in its intelligent, understated direction by the Rumanian Jean Negulesco, distinguished by the stunning performances of Claudette Colbert and Sessue Hayakawa. Negulesco, who is perhaps best known among film fans for the fifties' crowd-pleasers How to Marry a Millionaire and Three Coins in the Fountain and his masterpiece, Jane Wyman's 1948 Oscar-winner Johnny Belinda, was a director whose style was influenced by the general mies-en-scene, or overall "look" of the studios he worked for. These were Warner Brothers and Twentieth-Century-Fox, respectively. In a Jean Negulesco film one doesn't usually pick out extraordinary camera shots, because the emphasis is on character and atmosphere and how the characters are often so affected by their environment as to be very nearly engulfed by it. This was literally the case with the Joan Crawford character in Negulesco's unforgettable Humoresque. In Three Came Home he adopted the spareness of the Fox lot's production values- no gloss- to invoke the harshness and deprivation of a Japanese internment camp for women during World War II. Negulesco's pacing and emotional truth make every scene decidedly devoid of melodrama. I liked the scene of the character played by Colbert (on whose memoir the film is based) searching in the night darkness for her quarters before being caught by the prison camp guards. Absolutely harrowing and poignant at the same time, and the scene's wrap-up is emotionally and overpoweringly satisfying. As is the entire picture. Claudette Colbert (like her contemporaries Greer Garson, Deborah Kerr, Dorothy McGuire, Jean Simmons) was a great female star who evoked her own natural warmth and friendliness through her roles. Primarily remembered for her charming comedic performances (It Happened One Night, Midnight, The Egg and I chief among them) she grew into a dramatic actress of power far and above sincerity and star magnetism. Never was she more real and on-the-mark than in her portrayal of Agnes Keith in Three Came Home. Her scenes with Sessue Hayakawa (superb as a powerless, conscience-stricken Japanese commander) are wonderful, as are the scenes with (precious) Mark Keuning as her little son and the finale. Three Came Home was a brave film to make for its time due to its balanced perspective of two cultures represented by two main characters, showing the inhumane and human sides of war. It failed at the box office though critically acclaimed. It should be seen and appreciated as a film testament to a time in history, a delineation of the impact of tyranny and intolerance that can still be felt in today's world.