AUSTRALIAN PICTURES: In Theory and Practice

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 261, 23 June 1944, Page 17

AUSTRALIAN PICTURES: In Theory and Practice

ing the possibilities of making a full-length film about Australia for Ealing Studios, London, is the Scottish film director Harry Watt. Target for To-night is his best-known film, but he has also directed several other British productions, including Nine Men, as well as collaborating on the Crown Film Unit documentaries, London Can Take It and Christmas Under Fire. N OW in Australia investigatI like the sound of Harry Watt. He has been giving his views on film-making to the Australian papers and judging by a bunch of clippings which I have just received he seems to have been talking very good sense. His idea is that the Australian film industry should concentrate on developing a type of picture which is the equivalent of the Hollywood Western. The Western, he very rightly says, has been the backbone of the American industry: it cannot be successfully made in Britain because Britain

has no wide open spaces, no spectacular outdoor scenery of rolling plains and towering mountains, and no pioneer history of tough men winning a living from the wilderness; but Australia has all that, and so Australian producers should specialise first in simple, picturesque stories, full of brisk and exciting action. Bigger and more sophisticated films could come later. * * * OW this is so exactly what I have myself written about Australian film production in the past that it would be surprising if I did not find myself wholeheartedly in agreement with Mr. Watt. Perhaps on this occasion I may be permitted to repeat ‘something I wrote in 1938 when reviewing an Australian film: "Australia should concentrate on drama of physical action (the equivalent of the Western) which exploits the magnificent outdoor scenery and the excellence of Australian photography instead of tackling a novelettish story like this .. ." That was said in a review of The Broken Melody. I wonder how many

readers recall its naive crudities, and those of similar films like The Silence of Dean Maitland? By producing these elaborate emotional melodramas the Australian film industry, was, of course, trying to show the world that it had reached adult status, but it merely succeeded in revealing that, far from being grown up, (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) it was still in the crawling stage. Australia did much better, I think, in The Squatter’s Daughter, because that film, in spite of trite situations, amateurish acting, and woeful, dialogue, did at least contain some outdoor action and some fine scenery, But it probably did best of all when it imported the Hollywood actor Victor Jory and made an honest-to-goodness outback melodrama called Rangle River. With improvements and refinements, that is the type of film which I imagine Harry Watt is now advocating as the backbone of Australian production. I hope they take his advice. THER things which Harry Watt has been saying in Australia also sound pretty good to me, though I can imagine they may not sound quite so good to some people in the cinema business. For example, he considers the star-system a Bad Thing. "It’s a lazy way," he says. "It makes for bad films because the star is relied on to sell the picture and the story is let go. I’d like to see it disappear; in fact, I’d like to see tougher criticism of stories from the public. I’d like to see bad films booed off the screen." (If our little man were not retained _ solely for the purpose of film reviews, he would at this point appear and give his well-known demonstration of a stand-up clap, in Mr. Watt’s honour.) Apparently it has occurred to Mr. Watt that audiences might sometimes (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) make a mistake and boo good films instead of bad ones, but that is "only a question of education," he says. Indeed, as a member of what is generally regarded as a fairly cynical profession, he appears to have a remarkably high opinion not only of his own calling but of audiences. "Films are not a soporific," he is reported as saying, "They are primarily entertainment, but that is no reason why they should not also be educational. Documentary films simply dramatise fact: the only difference between it and the ordinary fiction film is that with a documentary film you start off with real situations." He refuses to put blondes in the bomb-racks when he makes war films; he thinks that British films have gained prestige during the war (so do I, by comparison with American); and he has a "dream" about a scheme of reciprocal exchange of film technicians throughout the world after the war — Englishmen going to Australia, Australians going to Russia, Russians going to Amierica, and so on. When questioned about his cinematic ideals he prefers to express them in the words of Alexandr Dovjenko, the great Russian producer: "Film. workers! Don’t varnish the world of to-day. Do not ‘make it up’ out of your imaginings. The world is now very ill. Do not divert your art to trivial individual matters. The cinema must and can give the answer to the sorest, sharpest contemporary problems. It must honestly help suffering mankind to find its bearing." Fine words, but Harry Watt strikes one as the kind of man who might try to make them mean something. He is young enough-only 37. And having discovered all this about him, I was finally not altogether surprised to learn that he started film work with John Grierson, pioneer of the documentary. This is the Grierson touch-this almost inspired belief in the serious mission of the cinema.