10 Jun A Town Like Alice
A Town Like Alice, WWII Movie starring Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch. Based on the novel by Nevil Shute.
(1958) When the Japanese invade Malaya in 1941 a young British secretary is taken prisoner with other women and children. They are forced to walk hundreds of miles from one Japanese outpost to another.
I was curious about the title. A Town Like Alice? Well, Alice (short for Alice Springs) is a large town in Australia. In 1950 a book by the same name was written by Nevil Shute, a well known British-Australian writer, and the movie was based on that. Someone else must have been confused about the title because in the U.S. the book was released as The Legacy, the movie as The Rape of Malaya.
On the website dedicated to Shute’s books I read that this is “one of Nevil Shute’s most beloved and popular novels … rated as the 17th best novel published in the English language since 1900, in a 1998 Modern Library poll of readers.”
The characters are based on real people who never knew each other in real life. In the movie, it becomes as much a love story as a war story. The two lead actors, Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch, do an excellent job of bringing the story to life.
A Town Like Alice at amazon.com
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