3 - The Formation of a Budding Man Alone: The God Boy (Murray Reece, 1976)

Summary

Murray Reece's adaptation of Ian Cross’ critically acclaimed novel The God Boy (1957) appeared on New Zealand screens in 1976, and is the first genuine coming-of-age film made in this country. Even though it did not achieve a theatrical release – it was the first television feature of the newly formed national network Television One, and is now no longer readily accessible other than online at the internet site, NZ On Screen – it is historically important for a number of reasons. First, it showed a new generation of New Zealanders that their own stories could not only be entertaining when dramatized on the screen, but also that they were capable of bringing to light, and addressing, the most complex and challenging aspects of their existence in a distinctive, evolving culture. Second, The God Boy exemplifies the ongoing legacy of some of the major themes that had dominated New Zealand literary fiction since the 1930s.

These themes have been meticulously detailed by the literary scholar Lawrence Jones, and by social historians, such as Jock Phillips: the dominance of ‘puritan’ moral values, whether religiously imposed or imposed in a displaced secular form; a form of Stoicism manifest in a valorization of the necessity for steadfastness, self-reliance, and self-improvement (which were reinforced by the need to settle a new country); and an inculcated fear of worldly temptations, such as sex and other expressions of the senses or emotions that could make a man ‘soft’ or a ‘sissy’ – and hence unworthy of assuming the status of an effective provider or protector in the circumstances of the infant nation, separated from its mother country by the greatest geographical (but not cultural) distance it was possible to imagine.

In the literature of the inter-war period and the first two decades of the post- Second World War period, issues of this sort were reflected in a preoccupation with the family as the locus of the discontent and destructive psychological consequences that they generated.