TV REVIEWS : ‘Cries’ Echoes Women-in-Jeopardy Soapers

A curiously old-fashioned war movie, “Silent Cries” (at 9 tonight on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39) features Gena Rowlands as the leader of a pack of brutalized British and American women held captive by the Japanese during World War II.

As an odd chapter in the military history of the Pacific (adapted from Janice Young Brooks’ book, “Guests of the Emperor”), the story echoes the war’s earliest women-in-jeopardy soapers, “Cry Havoc” and “So Proudly We Hail!” (both 1943), to the more recent TV movie, “Women of Valor” (1986), which was about women nurses captured in the Philippines.

Some stories never wear out their welcome, and this one has its moments of gritty heroism as the women prisoners devise strategies to keep alive in the face of a fiendish Japanese commander played so broadly (by the sneering Clyde Kusatsu) that he unwittingly becomes a caricature of U.S. propaganda warfare of the time.

Seen today, Kusatsu’s portrayal is so politically incorrect that the only thing he lacks is Coke bottle eye glasses. More to the point, this is precisely the leering image of the Japanese with which young Americans grew up in the ‘40s.

In that sense, the movie may be old-fashioned, but it’s certainly instructive about racial stereotyping in a way the movie makers (director Anthony Page and writers Vicki Patik and Walter Halsey Davis) may not have intended.

There’s also a good Japanese commander (Sab Shimono) to compromise the hell endured by these women (including effecting performances by Annabeth Gish and Chloe Webb), but, unfortunately for them, he’s not around much.