Hammers over the Anvil Director: Ann Turner

Rip It Up, Issue 210, 1 February 1995, Page 38

Hammers over the Anvil Director: Ann Turner

Russell Crowe plays it straight in his second film of the month — and he’s a hunky sight in the opening scene, frolicking bare-back and bare-butt with his horses in the river.

Developed from Alan Marshall’s stories of the same name, Ann Turner’s film gives us something of a teenager’s rites of passage in the South Australian outback in 1910. We see everything through the eyes of the young and crippled Marshall, who is already an enthusiastic diarist — his idolising of the lusty East Driscoll and his crush on the soigne Grace McAllister. We see him with his peers and, with the batty Mrs Bilson (a marvellously theatrical Alethea McGrath), squatting in pigsties, hiding from her irate daughter, and getting together to smoke the cane she strips off the verandah chairs.

Hammers avoids much of the sentimentality which might have seemed part and parcel of such an Edwardian saga, helped to a great extent by Alexander Outhred’s clear-eyed performance as Alan. An eye for period detail assists too, from the jollity of the Turalla Pig Fair, boyhood wanking in the long grass, and stinking out the Turalla Catholic Ball by scattering wattle seeds on the floor. Only towards the end, does it come a bit unhinged, as the minor Lady Chatterly sub-plot has its way. The outcome of the affair between Grace and East is brutal, shocking, and jars in a film whose strength lies in keenly observed understatement.

WILLIAM DART