Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

disgusting, overrated, pointless

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

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.

Just saw this again on the BBC.There must be something horribly wrong with modern Hollywood that we get more enjoyment from 50-year-old movies. This little gem has lovely, bright colour (not the dungeon quality we get now), has super performances, particularly from the young leads, works well as a story and also as a very interesting travelogue of post-war Japan.No foul language and you feel good afterwards.I'm just so pleased that with TV and DVD we can see these wonderful older movies and introduce them to our own children. I would add this to the list of must-show-to-the-children movies like the Flicka ones and the old Joel McCrea "Cattle Drive" and "Saddle Tramp".

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.

Young Jon Provost, later to star in "Lassie", got his first notice in this charming story of a chase in 1950's Japan. He plays the son of an American couple working in Japan who survives a airplane ditching off the coastline; he got separated from the crew, and in the fog is picked up by a fisherman.This Japanese fishing family befriends him, even though they cannot talk to him, not knowing English. The boy, however, fears he did something wrong when he sees many Japanese police searching the village. He flees, along with the slightly older son of the fisherman. Then begins the chase between the police and the American couple, and the two boys who fear the police only try to find you when you've done something wrong.The bulk of the movie is of the two boys fleeing through Japan and seeing different and interesting sights on their odyssey. It is in effect a travelogue of post-war Japan. The final scenes on top of a tall Shinto religious temple are exciting enough.Colorful, and good family fare, the film also was a clear attempt to ease hostilities between the United States and a Japan that just a decade before had been a hated enemy. They did this by showing the Japanese as human being as concerned about their missing son as the Americans were about theirs. Recommended! Give it a try if you see it.