6 - The Drifting Avenger (1968)

Summary

TOEI, NIKKATSU AND TOHO DOWN UNDER

Despite vociferous calls for increased support to the Australian film industry by practitioners, cultural commentators and some politicians, 1968 and 1969 were still largely fallow years for local feature-film production (see, for example, Thornhill 1985: 166–70). Of the eight features made across these two years, none made a significant impact at the Australian box office, though You Can't See ‘Round Corners (David Cahill, 1969), Age of Consent (Michael Powell, 1969) and The Intruders (Lee Robinson, 1969), a quickly made attempt to exploit the phenomenal recent international success of the television series Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, featuring almost all of the same personnel in front of and behind the camera, did well in specific locations. Aside from, arguably, Age of Consent, which was also the biggest commercial success of this ragtag group, none of these ‘local’ productions left a lasting impression on Australian audiences or its national cinema.

The most intriguing and surprising ‘Australian’ films made across these two years were stand-alone productions completed by three different major Japanese studios (in the order of their completion: Toei Company, Nikkatsu Corporation and Toho Co.) and exploiting their host country's natural resources, locations and filmmaking facilities. News of this surprising spate of regionally specific international production emerged in early 1968 when the Sydney press announced that ‘A MAJOR Japanese film company plans to shoot a $200,000 colour movie in Australia this autumn’, exploiting the backdrop of ‘the search for Bass Strait oil’ (‘Bass Strait Oil Hunt Inspires a Japanese Film’ 1968: 6). It would feature ‘an Australian female lead’ and was plainly aimed at highlighting Australia's mineral wealth, a core platform of the emerging cultural, geopolitical and economic relationship between the two countries (‘Bass Strait Oil Hunt Inspires a Japanese Film’ 1968: 6). It was to be made by Nikkatsu, Japan's oldest major film studio. The finished movie ultimately shifted its focus to a young advertising illustrator who comes to Sydney, Newcastle, the area around Tamworth in northern New South Wales and, as originally planned, Fiji, seeking inspiration for the tourism campaign he is contracted to work upon.