UNDER THE SOUTHERN CROSS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 951, 1 November 1957, Page 21

UNDER THE SOUTHERN CROSS

(Rank-Ealing) G Cert. ARMAND AND MICHAELA DENIS UNDER THE SOUTHERN CROSS (to give this full-length travelogue its full-length title) won’t tell you much about the wild animals and birds of Australia that isn’t known already to every Crosbie Morrison fan, but it does give one a picture-though a rather general and hasty one-of the brilliant colour, the oddity, and the teeming variety of the Commonwealth’s wild life. When one remembers such outstanding nature films as The Living Desert and The Great Adventure, however, and the immense expenditures of time and patience which they palpably represented, the Denis safari from Adelaide to the Cape York Peninsula seems a hurried affair. One doesn’t really get a long enough look at anything, and frequently the photography (by Des Bartlett) isn’t equal to the subject. One of the more amazing of the shots shows a rock python engulfing its dinner, but it’s not much more than a shot. Disney’s men would have made a sequence of it. Mr Bartlett is more successful in his renvers of aborigines, and the few days e Denis caravanserai spent among these cheerful people provided easily the best of this film. There’s the inevitable comic capital made of the natives’ dietary (witchetty grubs, honey ants like mechanised lollies, wallaby grilled in situ, and so forth), but there are also many passages which show genuine understanding and appreciation of native life and custom.