other film with this theme
A movie with a similar theme is "Paradise Road" which is a true story about a group of women and children in a Japanese concentration camp, who hold up their morale by forming a vocal chorus.
Paradise Road is a very good movie which was largely overlooked, and what a cast! Power Player Glenn Close is hardly the only interesting one in a supporting cast which includes actresses who were or would soon become some of the world's best and most acclaimed. Future superstar Cate Blanchett makes an early appearance, the versatile Frances McDormand, old pro Pauline Collins of Upstairs/Downstairs , Popular TV star Julianna Margulies in one of her best though least remembered performances, Dutch actress Johanna ter Steege who is sadly under the radar in the English-speaking world, and the gorgeous Jennifer Ehle of Pride and Prejudice fame. Each of them very fine actresses in their own ways, and none of them really recognized for their work in this film.
The other high profile dramatization of women's internment during the Pacific war would be the BBC TV series Tenko. I haven't seen it, but it looks promising. To get that bedraggled prisoner look, wardrobe supposedly tossed a bunch of period dresses and shoes in a heap on the floor, then unleashed the actresses to fight Hunger Games style for the best fitting and most flattering among them...a process similar to what one might imagine for dressing prisoners in an actual concentration camp. It was a popular series back in the '80s, and from what I've heard, very effective.
Paradise Road, while a very good film and based on a book by one of the survivors, made the same mistake as Three Came Home: i.e. the characters were too well fed, clean and well dressed for the way they would have looked in reality. Although a brief mention was made in the latter film that the women were allotted five tablespoons of rice a day, with the occasional vegetables, and which was cut several times. By the end of the war they were reduced to near skeletons and down to about 750 calories a day and hunger was once of the major points in Agnes Newton Keith's books. Mrs. Keith spent several months in hospital after the liberation. I have not seen photos of the camps when they were liberated, but Lady Mountbatten toured for the relief effort and described the truly appalling conditions.
The women wore the same clothes throughout their internment, which were dropping apart at the end. Several women brought clothes with them, but they were either bartered quickly or just abandoned on the long marches from camp to camp. Glenn Close managed to look *beep* and span and even retain the pleats in her skirt.