Will they ever re-unite in Alice Springs and fall in love in a trice so that all can end well? But Joe has won the lottery, and learned that Jean wasn't married, so has hared off to London in search of her. She travels to Alice Springs, and then to 'Willstown' in the Queensland outback where Joe has become a manager of a cattle station. When he dies, Jean asks the village elders if the women can stay and work the paddy fields in return for food and shelter, and so they pass the next three years until the war ends.īack in the present, Jean learns from the well-diggers that Harman didn't die, and returned to Australia. The contemptuous Japanese assign only an elderly sergeant to guard the women, and they become friendly with him.

When the thefts are discovered, Joe takes the blame, is crucified, and left to die by the Japanese, as the distraught women are marched away. Jean survives because she's willing to go native, and because she meets a young Australian soldier Sergeant Joe Harman (Peter Finch) who is driving a truck for the Japanese.Īppalled by the treatment of the women, Joe steals food and medicine for them, while telling Jean about the town he grew up in, Alice Springs in central Australia.īut their relationship remains chaste, as Joe forms the impression Jean is married, and she doesn't correct the notion. Taken prisoner, the Malay-speaking Jean assumes a leading role amongst the prisoners, but other women, unused to the physical labour, the cruelty, and the diet on what becomes a long trek, fade away.

Jean arrives in the village and the well is dug, and in a flashback we return to the time when Jean was working as a typist in an office in Kuala Lumpur and the Japanese invaded. Just after the second world war in London, Jean Paget (Virginia McKenna) is told by solicitor that she's come into a large inheritance, and she decides to travel to Malaya to build a well in a small village.

Author a town like alice