Film appreciation - A Town Like Alice (1956), adapted from Nevil Shute's novel, a portrait of Malaya

A Town Like Alice
Peter Finch, Virginia McKenna
Director: Jack Lee

There are two versions of novelist Nevil Shute's classic portrait of Malaysia - Malaya as it was then - in the second world war: a 1981 miniseries for Australian TV and a 1956 feature film starring Peter Finch and Virginia McKenna.

This doubling is apt for a story that is itself about pairs, albeit irreconcilable ones.

There is a central culture clash: between Japanese soldiers and British women. There are doublings of place: the real Alice Springs, where our hero Joe Harman (Finch) is from, and an imagined place that soothes the mind of our heroine, the philanthropic heiress Jean Paget (McKenna). Finally, there is a doubling in realpolitik: the end of British-colonised Malaya and the beginnings of Malaysia as an independent country.

The story is channelled through Jean. Indeed, one of the novel's chief strengths is its quiet subversion of the classic, male prison camp narrative.