Saw last 3/4s of movie. Didn't find it all that bad. Acting good & held you. Understand argument at end of movie. Bronze Star was based on their meritorious specialized service, medical. Military doesn't appear specific about awarding the inclusive V to noncombatants but that appears to be the consistency of it. 2 months after MacArthur left PI & Corregidor fell, there were many POWs. My father included. He spent 3 years as a POW. The first 4 months were in a concentration camp. These women are fortunate that they got the recognition they did. What I fail to understand is the concentration camp consisted of Americans & foreigners. Where are all the Filipinos that served alongside them? Only Filipinos shown were guerrilla fighters.

If you like the classics Three Came Home and A Town Called Alice, you might want to watch the more modern version Women of Valor. Starring Susan Sarandon, it follows a group of Army nurses who refuse to evacuate from their station in the Philippines and get imprisoned by Japanese soldiers. There's a variety of characters, from the meek to the bold, but nothing about this version really stands out from the original 1950 drama. It's very, very similar to Three Came Home. There's an attempted rape, scrambling for food, a sympathetic Japanese colonel, and one of the women sneaks out to meet her husband at the separate men's camp. Sarandon fans can check it out, but there's no comparison to Claudette Colbert's award-winning performance.

Incidentally, Sarandon was the only woman in the cast brave enough not to shave her armpits (you can catch her bold choice again in White Palace) - which I loved. POWs were not given razors! It's about time women were shown to be grungy, braless, sweaty, filthy, and without makeup or hair products (I guess Kristy McNichol had a natural shaggy 'do). It almost makes up for Alberta Watson's reason for almost missing the evacuation bus: she had to put on a lacy black negligee. I'm not kidding. She couldn't just grab it and stuff it in her suitcase (or God forbid, leave it behind when her life is at stake). She had to give a dramatic reveal to her fellow nurses as to why they all almost were killed. Had I been one of the supporting characters, I probably would have pushed her off the bus.