3 - Kangaroo (1952)

Summary

‘THE AUSTRALIAN STORY’: HOLLYWOOD ARRIVES DOWN UNDER

Observing that ‘all national cinemas are implicated internationally’ (1996: 56), Tom O’Regan makes note of the ‘contribution’ that Australian-made and shot films – in particular bushranger and drover films – have made to the western genre over a long period of time, starting with The Story of the Kelly Gang (Charles Tait, 1906) (1996: 168), often claimed to be the first feature film made anywhere in the world. Focusing on the former, William D. Routt attends specifically to the similarities between early US westerns and Australian bushranger films – the historical frontier settings, use of landscape and early twentieth-century period of production – but resists the label ‘bush westerns’, preferring to characterise a group of early bushranger films – several Kelly Gang films and up to fifteen others such as Robbery Under Arms (Charles MacMahon, 1907), Thunderbolt (John Gavin, 1910) and Captain Starlight, or Gentleman of the Road (Alfred Rolfe, 1911) – as belonging to a ‘western-like genre’ that grew out of local conditions (Routt 2001). Making a related argument, Peter Limbrick refers to the western as ‘a settler colonial mode of cinema’, describing all but the last of five films made by Ealing Studios in Australia in the 1940s and 1950s – The Overlanders (Harry Watt, 1946), Eureka Stockade (Harry Watt, 1949), Bitter Springs (Ralph Smart, 1950), The Shiralee (Leslie Norman, 1957) and The Siege of Pinchgut (Harry Watt, 1959) – as works that use the iconography and narrative situations familiar from the genre (2007: 68–9). While seeking to acknowledge the western's significant place, production and popularity outside of America, Limbrick cautions against ignoring the wider record of US interests in Australia, pointing out that Ealing's plan to establish an ongoing presence in the country was disrupted by a more general national turn away from Britain to the US in the postwar era, as well as the making of large-scale American ‘runaway’ productions such as Kangaroo (Lewis Milestone, 1952), On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959) and The Sundowners (Fred Zinnemann, 1960) (Limbrick 2007: 83).