JEDDA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 823, 6 May 1955, Page 19

JEDDA

(Charles Chauvel-Columbia) CCF ITTLE wild goose" is how "Jedda" translates, apparently, and a little wild oose Jedda looks like becoming for ten minutes or so while the didgeridoo throbs and a magnificent bearded aborigine tries to "sing her to his blanket." This is the point where the film really comes to life. It’s here also that it develops into a chase story which, kept alive by a variety of adventures and the well-tried practice of cutting back and forth between pursuers and pursued; maintains a fair state of tension for the rest of the distance What happens before this? Jedda is an aborigine orphan who is brought in to a Northern Territory cattle station soon after the owner’s wife lost her baby. She is reared as a white child, kept away from the other blacks about the place, courted by a young half-caste; but her restless desire ‘to taste the life of her people flows over when the wild young native, Marbuck, comes: to the station. In the exciting sequence I’ve mentioned she is drawn to his camp one night by his. primitive dance. Considering her upbringing, it should astonish no one that she’s immediately disillusioned, but Marbuck flees with her, pursued by her lover and the police-for it turns out that the black is rather.a bad egg. The-first part of the film is moderately interesting. Of course, the setting is unusual, and the warm, dry, sun-baked north comes through beautifully inGevacolour, which from an earlier encounter I had remembered for its blues. There are some good moments in the life of Jedda as a child, and Negarla Kunoth conveys something of her conflict of spirit as a young woman between two worlds. On the other hand, George Simpson-Lyttle as the station owner never looks like coming to life as he delivers in a flat voite some pretty flat lines. Robert Tudawali:as Marbuck has an’ animal vitality that has every opportunity to express itself, and, the plot apart, it’s not surprising that the film takes a turn for the better when he arrives. Once his climactic scene with the girl is over she isn't called on for

much more than some variatians on a note of fear, though it must be said she does these quite well. Neither of these aborigine players, by the way, is a professional. actor, and I think the director, Charles Chauvel, has done a remarkable job to make them carry the burden of a film which, even without the crocodiles, the wild-looking tribesmen, and other incidental excitement, would never be dull. I can. only hope, since my knowledge of the Australian native is very limited, that he has shown respect for the truth. This is a film which many will enjoy; and but for an agonising reappraisal this week of some of my recent gradings it would have reached a higher point on the barometer.