“A Town Like Alice” is one of the enduring wartime romances from a sort of golden age of that genre. It’s not “From Here to Eternity” or “Doctor Zhivago,” but one could certainly see David Lean or Fred Zinneman taking an interest in Nevil Shute’s novel, had the right people pitched it.
A saga of the trials of war and beyond, when a mere glimpse of compassion and kindness could be enough to sustain those struggling through the worst the hope that only love can give, enduring the unendurable to attain it, the novel became a gripping and sometimes touching film placed in the hands of a very sympathetic Virginia McKenna, paired with Peter Finch at his most charming.
If you’re familiar with the acclaimed 1980s Australian mini-series aired on PBS, you might wonder how this epic could ever be boiled down to feature film length. The solution of the J. Arthur Rank production was to simply leave out the portion about the “town,” an Outback outpost not at all like “Alice Springs,” the setting for the life our two lovers attempt to share after the war.
The best-known film from lightly-regarded British director Jack Lee (“Maniacs on Wheels,” “Undersea Raider”) would focus on the British women imprisoned and “death marched” by the Japanese all over Malaya after the Japanese conquest of Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and environs in early 1942.
Later films such as “Paradise Road” and “Women of Valor” (made for TV) would cover similar ground, and in the case of “Paradise Road,” wring even more pathos out of this war crime romance than “Alice” managed.
McKenna, most famous for “Born Free,” is Jean Paget, a young and single Englishwoman in an Amelia Earhart bob employed in British colonial secretarial work in Malaya at the outbreak of the war. But we meet her after the conflict, when she tells her London solicitor (Geoffrey Keen, a fixture of the James Bond films of the ’60s and ’70s) about her desire to return to the Malayan village that sheltered her during the war and “give them the one thing they really need — a well,” now that she’s come into some money.
That framing device sets up her flashback to the chaos of her evacuation, how she stayed late and answered a call from her boss’s wife, an Englishwoman with three small children at an utter loss over how she’s supposed to manage fleeing since “the servants have all gone.”
Jean joins the Hollands (Eileen Moore, John Fabian) as an informal nanny as they try to outrun the Japanese. They’re caught and all the men in their group are shipped off to a POW camp. But despite the assurances that “Imperial Japanese soldiers always kind to women and children,” the conquerors have no provision for their housing, feeding and care and no use for European women who can’t build railroads or be of use.
They’re to march 50 miles to this city or 40 miles to that camp, even 200 miles across Malaysia to the other coast. No trucks, no boat, no train, because as the various Japanese officers (Trae Van Khe, Munesato Yamada, Nakanishi, Vu Ngoc Tuan) bark, “Japanese women walk.”
The script doesn’t spare us aloof British attitudes about “kow towing” to their captors, whom they have always regarded as their inferiors, with this or that captive huffing about “maintaining standards/appearances” and not dressing or acting like the compliant Malays.
Jean finds herself sole caregiver for the children as their mother dies and lays that responsibility on her. With all this marching, no milk or even clean water in sight, not all the children will survive.
An instance of kindness from the locals, and a moment or two when the mostly-polite Japanese soften their racist “death march” ethos doesn’t sustain her. But bumping into a brazen, frisky Aussie POW pressed into service as a supply truck driver by the Japanese does.
Joe Harman (Finch) may confuse her for a native and use an Aussie racial slur when he first addresses Jean. But these two instantly connect over what isn’t said between them, and what is.
He’s never been in the presence of “an English lady,” he gushes. “You’re quite an oil painting yourself,” she flirts back.
He doesn’t question her marital status or the children in her care, and instantly starts helping them whenever he can — food, quinine (for malaria), whatever he can “scrounge.” They meet, by chance, in camps, or along the road, as he’s always driving and singing Aussie songs with his mate (Vincent Ball) to keep their Japanese handler dozing, and she’s always being marched here or there.
But those walking with Jean, and in her care, drop like flies on these murderous treks.
Joe’s life-saving gifts, and Jean’s increasingly-smitten reaction to the attention, lighten a dark story that, however uneven, never lets us forget the stakes such people faced under those conditions.
The context of the era of this 1956’s film’s release, close on the heels of the publication of the novel makes an interesting lens to view it through. “Alice” suggests Japanese war crimes at a time when the West was trying to court Japan and keep the country from falling under communist influence, but the film softens some of the inherent harshness in its story, although it was still withdrawn from the Cannes Film Festival for fear of offending the Japanese, a culture already wrapping itself in victimhood about a war of enslaving conquest which Japan instigated.
I like the way the film doesn’t translate the Japanese orders, threats and commands, letting audiences then and now experience the fear that a language barrier and mutual misunderstanding and hatred engendered.
Finch is a delight, a classic war movie “type” — the swaggering scrounger — here given a good-hearted edge thanks to his obvious affection for this woman who might be married, who plainly “has children,” but who allows him the chance to show a little Oz chivalry.
McKenna is the heart and soul of the film, suggesting a woman hardened by the experience in the “present day” scenes, but letting us see the gentle spirit battered by her ordeal, crushed by loss as she lived through it.
Unfortunately, Lee and the screenwriters let us sense what’s missing, what they’re skipping past or leaving out by necessity, which highlights the novel’s melodramatic touches — all the important details left unsaid, the convenience of characters coming into “money,” Jean’s understanding of the Koran, which comes in handy when you’re trying to charm Muslim Malayans into hiding you from the Japanese.
The third act, in particular, seems jerky and jumpy as the screenplay struggles to wrap things up with a too predictable romantic “Affair to Remember” surprise in a story that would go on for some time after this big “Lovers at Long Last Meet and Embrace.”
But for all that, for the many British soundstages and exterior locations often (but not always) substituting for Malaysia in the ’40s, “A Town Like Alice” still manages to work and tug at the heart. The contrast between English reserve and Aussie outspokenness is nicely played-up, the violence and the threat of it palpable and the racist nature of the conflict in the Pacific underscored and easily understood.
As a film, you can sense greater possibilties and see the mini-series to come in this saga, even if the Australian “town like” “Alice Springs” barely makes an appearance.
Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Virginia McKenna, Peter Finch, Jean Anderson, Kenji Takaki, Eileen Moore, Trae Van Khe, Munesato Yamada, Nakanishi, Vu Ngoc Tuan, Nora Nicholson and Geoffrey Keen.
Credits: Directed by Jack Lee, scripted by W.P. Lipscomb and Richard Mason based on the novel by Nevil Shute. A J. Arthur Rank release on Tubi.
Running time: 1:56
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