A Town Like Alice

The Rank Organisation went whole hog in producing A Town Like Alice with location shooting in Malaya, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The results were well worth the effort and the film was a big boost to the careers of Peter Finch and Virginia McKenna. In fact as Finch was becoming more and more an international star he would get fewer roles like this one, playing a native Australian.

I was expecting when deciding to view this film that it would be similar in nature to the American film Three Came Home that starred Claudette Colbert as a woman prisoner of the Japanese in World War II. The woman prisoners were segregated, but quickly housed and fended for themselves as best they could, but in a static setting.

When the male prisoners are separated from the females after the fall of Malaya, these woman are put under guard and just sent around like vagabonds with their children if they had them. Why they were selected for this rather special brand of torture we can speculate on end, but whatever the Japanese idea of chivalry was to the women, they couldn't just outright kill them. In fact none are during this film.

The film is seen through McKenna's eyes, she's working as a secretary in Kuala Lampur when the Japanese takeover. She takes over too as guardian of her boss's kids after their mother dies early on in the strange odyssey. Peter Finch plays an Australian soldier who with his mates they constantly run into and who offers them help when he can sneak food and medicine from the Japanese. He pays a heavy price for doing this when he's caught.

When he was killed by Irish Terrorists in 1979, it was learned that Lord Mountbatten had specifically requested that at his funeral no representation from the Japanese was to be permitted. As Supreme Commander of that theater Mountbatten remembered all the horror stories he heard from people survived Japanese internment, even the strange internment where apparently the whole country was their jail.

How McKenna and those that remained survived is quite a story, let's say it involved breaking a lot of cultural barriers to do it. One of the women who did it her own way was Maureen Swanson who after McKenna refuses his proposition, she takes up with a Japanese captain. Swanson is another you'll remember from A Town Like Alice.

Alice refers to Alice Springs in Northern Territory where Finch reminisces he'd like to return. It sounds like heaven, looks pretty good too after the years in Malaya. The film is a really good war film from the not often heard from point of view of woman prisoners.

A Town Like Alice is now an old film. However it has a certain directness and freshness which makes it quite watchable.

A Town like Alice is the story of an English nurse, who is trapped in Malaya with a group of Englihs women during the Japanese invasion. As the group can't be categorised by the Japanese army into a useful pigeonhole, they are forced to walk from city to city looking for a place to be prisoners-of-war.

The story is a strong one and the movie doesn't let the book down. Shot in excellent locations in Malaysia, the only problems are fitting the breadth of the story into a limited time.

I suppose that it should be confessed at the outset that I had the hots for Ms McEnna in her youth. Nevertheless, I still think that this is an excellent movie of the 1950's war genre.

Ginny and Peter Finch provide typically understated performances that are reminiscent of 'Ice Cold In Alex' and 'The Cruel Sea'. Solid, sterling, stiff-upper-lip-stuff that has no place in the spineless, simpering, metro-sexual third millennium.

I have never read Shute's novel, so I cannot comment on what liberties have been taken, but viewed without prejudice as a movie outlining Japanese brutality and human endurance it is still a well-realised piece of work. Everyone gives a thoroughly believable turn, both Caucasian and Oriental alike, as Ms McEnna's character concludes 'you can't really hate anyone' in the end. Though the Japanese - like their Nazi counterparts - did their very best to merit it.

Ms McKenna leads a group of unwanted western women and children, for whom no Japanese officer wants responsibility. So; they get shunted from one place to another, on foot, inadequately fed, and without medical assistance. Inevitably; they begin dying. Finch plays a captured Aussie running trucks for the Japanese. Filmed in black-&-white, in Britain and on location, it offers a very believable turn upon the miasmic swamps, crippling heat, humidity and deluging rain.

Of course, it's a love story too. And here again Ginny and Peter play their parts to perfection. I defy any true romantic not to be rendered lachrymose by her realisation of his survival and their final meeting at the end. Her hasty, last-minute application of cosmetics is particularly touching and well-observed. As if he'd care a hoot one way or the other.

It's a great old feel-good movie for the austerity generation. I give it nine stars and good luck to 'em all I say.

This film is in the same league as the series Tenko for it's realism. I have also watched the mini series which could have it's moments too but the film wins because of the fact that it was made around a decade after it had happened, when things must have been quite fresh in everyones minds. These women were taken captive as the men were but they were not wanted by anyone. These women were far away from home with no clothes apart from what they stood up in, no money and they didn't speak the language. Given those fact the thoughts are so scary!

I have just posted a comment on "Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence" directed by Nagisa Oshima in the early 1980s. The main originality of MCML does not lie in its subject, as other films have dealt with Prisoner-of-War camps under the Japanese rule, the most famous of them remaining "The Bridge on the River Kwai" by David Lean (1957). As MCML is a much more recent film, it might be considered as a more realistic approach to the daily life in a camp under such circumstances; yet realistic films on this subject appeared as early as in the 1950s with works like "A Town like Alice" directed by Jack Lee, which was rejected in its time by the Cannes Film Festival for its shocking content and violence — a sharp contrast with often romanticized productions where war has a glamorous aspect. "A Town like Alice" is also original for it tells war from the point of view of women, and women in conflicts are often ignored by war movies.

It has been years now since I watched "A Town like Alice". I remember it as a good and honest film about the conflict with the Japanese in the Far East. Virginia McKenna as a British nurse and Peter Finch were both convincing. It may be not the best film on WWII, yet it has an authenticity and favors a psychological and realistic approach to the characters than can attract many viewers, not just war movies freaks.

By the way, the title is a reference to the town of Alice Springs, where the story ends.