ESCAPADE IN JAPAN is a children's film made in the 1950s which gives viewers a chance to view post-war Japan, in terms of geography and society, in full-blooded colour. There's little more reason to tune in than that, however. A kid goes missing and is pursued by the authorities; it turns out he's gone on a road trip of sorts with a like-minded Japanese boy and together the two of them visit various locations. A youthful Cameron Mitchell plays the boy's worried father. The boy is played by the blond kid from LASSIE a few years before he got that role and became familiar to American TV viewers. The slight story feels dragged out to the nth degree and despite my love of Japan I found it rather boring.

Set in post war Japan. A flight crash lands and a 6 year old American boy is found by a fisherman who takes him to his house, his wife nurses him back to health. The young lad gets on well with the fisherman's son but when they hear that the police are arriving both boys think they are in trouble and leave for Tokyo.Pretty soon both sets of distraught parents are looking for them as the boys to their best to evade the police and end up in bars and clubs.This is an amiable but casual and contrived film, it really is a B feature because it stars Cameron Mitchell who was well known for them.There are nice shots of post war Japan and shows mutual respect between the Americans and Japanese, laudable given this was made 11 years after the war ended.

This is the Japan of my early childhood memories, brought to life by this film. I was a boy of 4 when I moved to Japan in 1956, so seeing this movie which was shot at the same time I lived there was a great thrill. It was the travelogue aspect of the movie that particularly interested me: the vignette in the geisha house; the vignette in the Japanese theater;street scenes; railroad stations; etc. The plot was relatively simple. Cameron Mitchell and Theresa Wright were convincing as the worried married couple desperately trying to find their missing son. But the flattering portrayal of the Japanese people and the reverence shown for Japanese landmarks and its cultural is the real eye opener. Since it was made in 1957, I'm assuming it was to show Americans how their perceptions of the Japanese may have been wrong. I know that having there for 4 years, we couldn't have been treated more kindly than we were by our Japanese friends, neighbors, and co-workers. I thank Turner Classic Movies for showing it.

This film has a soft spot in me - the film was one of the first movies I ever attended in a movie house. Probably my parents took me to see it because Jon Provost was in it, and I was a fan of the series LASSIE. However it was on a double bill, and I believe it was with PETER PAN (the first Disney cartoon I saw in a movie house). I know I enjoyed it.A boy of three or four can barely remember details, but this film was very colorfully shot. It was one of a series of films of all types (SAYONARA, THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, A MAJORITY OF ONE) where Hollywood was trying to make amends to the Japanese for the caricatures of their military and leaders that were shown in the 1940s. The plot was that Provost gets separated from his parents in an accident off Japan, and ends up with a Japanese family. Soon he is paling around with that family's son, and they are unaware of the efforts by the U.S. and Provost's family to find him. Instead, when the police seem to be trying to catch him, Provost and his friend jump to the conclusion that they've done something criminal, and they run away. The film follows their constantly just escaping the police, until the conclusion (reminiscent of the conclusion in THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING) where everyone has to rescue the boys from a roof. It was a very exciting conclusion (and the music in those last moments helped really build up the suspense). It was a good film, and a welcome introduction for the younger version of me to the pleasures of watching movies.