CAESAR, DAVID. David Caesar is one of the new wave of Australian directors, raised in television drama and just beginning to make his mark in feature films. Caesar cut his directorial teeth with a documentary, Body Works (1988) written by Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki, which looked at the industries that deal with the deceased, followed by the little-known Greenkeeping (1992), which he wrote and directed. He then moved to television, directing episodes of the gritty, realistic ABC series, Wildside (1997), followed by episodes of Halifax (“Isn’t It Romantic” episode) in 1997, All Saints (1997), and Stingers (1998), among others. He returned to the silver screen, turning out Mullet (2001) and the crime/comedy Dirty Deeds (2002), both of which he wrote and directed. However, neither film made much of an impact at the box office, although the former did receive critical attention. Caesar has more recently returned to television.
CAMPION, JANE. See entry in New Zealand section.
CANTRILL, ARTHUR AND CORINNE. Making films for over 40 years, the artistic career of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill has had a consistency and purity that is remarkable both in Australia and internationally. The two began making documentary films on children’s craft activities in Brisbane for the Children’s Library and Crafts Movement in 1960. Simple narrative fictions including Kip and David (1961–1963) followed these. However, the two decided to break with this kind of representational mode. Lone voices at the time, they decided to publish a film journal. Thus, the first issue of Cantrills Filmnotes that appeared in 1971 carries a manifesto calling for films more concerned with matter and form that would “defy analysis” than with content. Remarkably, the journal remained in production, introducing ideas, nurturing talent, and stirring hornets’ nests, until 2000. It was Australia’s foremost journal of independent and avant-garde film and video production. Meanwhile, the two continued to pursue their vision of cinema. A series of biographical films (on Robert Klippel [1963-65], Charles Lloyd [1966], Will Spoor [1969], and Harry Hooton [1969]) followed. These challenged traditional documentary and culminated in the autobiographical grand opus In This Life’s Body (1984). This latter tells Corinne’s personal story at the same time as it addresses issues of the writing of autobiography. Meanwhile, the two had left Brisbane for London (1965–1969), Canberra (1969–1970), before settling in Melbourne.
Other sojourns in New York (1973–1975) and Berlin (1985) connected with the international avant-garde cinema movement. The materiality of film is evident through all their work, but becomes explicit in films such as Three Color Separation Studies—Landscapes (1976) and those concerning ethnographer Walter Baldwin Spencer including Reflections on Three Images by Baldwin Spenser (1974). Corinne’s early training as a botanist is apparent in their many films that focus on the Australian landscape such as At Uluru (1976–1977) and Tidal River (1996). They rework their earlier films, often presenting them as performance pieces. Much of their work has been on 16mm although since 1990, they have worked on 8mm film. Publishing a film journal and making films has brought them very little in the way of income and they have singularly lacked much institutional support. Nevertheless, they have worked on with energy, imagination, and enormous tenacity.
Over their long careers, the Cantrills have been well known and more appreciated abroad than within Australia, where the lot of the independent, experimental filmmaker can often be bleak indeed. Their filmwork is well known internationally: they are represented in several film collections including those of The Royal Film Archive of Belgium, Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek (Berlin), Deutsches Filmmuseum (Frankfurt), Musée national d’art moderne (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), New York Museum of Modern Art, PRÉA (Avignon), The British Council, and the National Library of Australia. Their films have been shown at the Centre Pompidou and The Louvre in Paris, the New York Museum of Modern Art, as well as other art museums and film festivals. Arthur Cantrill has given lectures on 19th Century Proto-Cinema, Len Lye, Color in Cinema, and other topics at Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, The National Library of Australia, ScreenSound Australia, and other places.
For a time, Arthur Cantrill held the position of associate professor of Media Arts in the School of Creative Arts, University of Melbourne, and now holds the emeritus position of senior associate there.
CAREFUL, HE MIGHT HEAR YOU (1983). Adapted from the novel of the same name by Sumner Locke Elliott, Careful, He Might Hear You tells the story of a battle for custody of the child PS (Nicholas Gledhill), fought by his two aunts Lila (Robyn Nevin) and Vanessa (Wendy Hughes). Lila is working class; Vanessa is from the upper end of town. PS’s father, Logan (John Hargreaves) is a shiftless and lazy man. Told through the eyes of PS, the story does not explore the advantages and disadvantages of the environments of wealth and simplicity. Rather, the film explores the meanings of those environments from the child’s perspective, ranging across the coldness of the objects of wealth because of the coldness of Vanessa, to the warmth of Lila’s home.
Careful, He Might Hear You was nominated in five categories in the 1983 Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards, and won awards in eight categories including best film, best director (Carl Schulz), best cinematography (John Seale), best adapted screenplay (Michael Jenkins), best leading actress (Hughes), and best supporting actor (Hargreaves).
CASTLE, THE (1997). The Castle was the first film to come from the collaboration of Rob Sitch—who also directed the film—Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, and Jane Kennedy, known collectively as Working Dog. The team drew on their successful television comedy writing skills to tell the story of the Kerrigans and their home, neighbors, and their resolution in the face of overwhelming odds. Their castle comprised not only their home at the end of the runway of an international airport, but also the associated elements of a home: family relationships, meals together, good neighbors, and contentment. Thus, when the authorities decide to acquire the land, the Kerrigans do not lie down and take it. Australian filmmaking has many examples where the little man, poor but proud, takes on the faceless and unfeeling bureaucracy and wins—for example, The Man Who Sued God (2001). Yet few films manage to do it so well, without falling into acts of stupidity. The Kerrigans and their friends resonate within the psyche of many Australians.
Released in the United States and the United Kingdom, The Castle performed well. It was nominated for three Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards in 1997 and won the award for best original screenplay.
CENSORSHIP. For the most part, film censorship in Australia has followed the path of censorship elsewhere although it has also been the site of moral panics unique to a state with authoritarian leanings. Indeed, in the period between 1930 and 1970, Australian censorship, including that of imported film, rivaled that of the Republic of Ireland in terms of its prurient narrowness of outlook. As occurred elsewhere, film censorship in its earliest years in Australia was a health-inspired regulation of place rather than a concern with film content. Subsequently, there has been much oscillation around censorship. For example, before 1910, boxing films were objects of criticism not only because of violence but also because they showed black victories. During World War I, a film of labor struggle was banned from screening. However, from the 1920s on and at different times, the censors have taken most exception to matters of violence and sex.
Meanwhile, the Australian Federation of its colonies in 1901 had brought into existence a dual system of censorship under which the Commonwealth controlled imports of printed material and cinematographic films. Initially, the Commonwealth was sparing in its import controls. But exhibitors also had state authorities to contend with as they too took a hand in the censorship and regulation of film. To make matters worse, national distributors had six different state authorities to deal with, each with its own standards and procedures. The late 1920s onward saw a considerable tightening of censorship generally and that of film in particular.
Mostly, up to this point, the states’ censorship officials had made the running as far as literature and film were concerned. However by the 1930s, the Commonwealth took over, denying Australians the right to read works by contemporary writers. This was part of a drive that was not only antimodern but also anti-American. Thus, concerns about their corrupting influence on Australian youth also led to the banning in 1938 of American comics. Nor, despite the best efforts of American film producers through the instrument of the Production Code, could many Hollywood films escape the same fate of either heavy cuts or outright banning. Thus, for example, the Charles Laughton film The Night of the Hunter was banned in 1955, not so much because of its suppressed sexuality but rather because of its subject matter that focused on a homicidal preacher, played by Robert Mitchum, who preyed on young widows, including Shelley Winters, marrying them and then strangling them for their savings. The film was banned because, in the eyes of the censor, it brought religion into disrepute. Although the film has since been screened several times on television, its theatrical ban has never been lifted.
Meanwhile, some states had kept their own censorship covering local productions, and giving them the opportunity to intervene in any federal decision with which they disagreed. In Victoria, for example, a 1926 act made state classification mandatory, preventing children six to 16 attending films deemed unsuitable. However, over the next 40 years, in concert with the general drift of powers from the states to the Commonwealth, several states ceded film censorship powers to federal bodies. In recent years, though, some states have reappointed advisory classifications systems.
By the 1960s, with the increasing pluralization of Australian society, opposition to film censorship grew considerably. With the spread of film culture, particularly as it was registered in the film festivals, there occurred major controversies around the cutting or banning of foreign art films. A compromise that allowed such films to escape the censor’s scissors provided they were screened only at the Sydney or Melbourne festivals actually opened the floodgates, forcing a more general liberalization of censorship. In fact, from the 1960s, literary and artistic censorship declined generally. By 1968, significant relaxation of Commonwealth controls had occurred, especially under the Liberal-Country Party customs minister, Don Chipp. Film censorship was eased, leading, in 1971, to the introduction of the “R” certificate. The cutting of films dropped noticeably and only extreme films were banned. Despite their initial fears, mainstream commercial cinema exhibition did not suffer but rather gained from this liberalization. Meanwhile, small newsreel theaterettes became specialist “R”-houses while drive-ins began two screenings, an early session for families with “G”-rated movies and an “M”-rated movie for younger adults.
Censorship’s internal impact on the local film production industry is unclear. Some earlier films inspired controversy for reasons that are now hard to gauge. The local producer/director Charles Chauvel frequently orchestrated censorship disputes in order to help market his films. In the early 1970s, films such as Alvin Purple (1973) deliberately set out to flout regulations concerning nudity and so on as a means of promotion and publicity.
However, by the late 1980s, the censorship pendulum was swinging the other way. Some feminists argued that pornography fostered violence against women. Others claimed a need to protect the rights of vulnerable minorities. Additionally, over the past 20 years, technological change, including the introduction of the video recorder, subscription television, and the Internet, have brought back arguments for stricter controls over graphic depictions of violence and pornography. In turn, film censors have become party to these disputes. With video, existing regulations were expanded but this was not enough, as the classifications proved insufficient to protect children from pornographic and violent material. The lack of uniformity of state and territory laws led to a boom in nonviolent pornography distributed and sometimes produced by the Canberra-based Eros Foundation. Meanwhile, sexual violence in both film and video began to excite the censor’s concern, which was now institutionalized in the Office of Film and Literature Classification. The fate of Pasolini’s Salo (Italy, 1975) is indicative of the different ways in which the winds of censorship have blown in Australia recently. The film was banned in the late 1970s. In 1993, judging that community standards were seen to have altered, censors allowed it to be released. However, Salo was banned again in 1998 as part of a more recent political and moral backlash.
CHAUVEL, CHARLES (1897–1959). Charles Chauvel is undoubtedly the great romantic, even heroic figure of Australian cinema from the 1920s to the 1950s, a compelling primitive as Stuart Cunningham (1991) has persuasively argued. In ambition and scope, his films deserve comparison with such Hollywood giants as Cecil B. de Mille and King Vidor. Yet if these comparisons are illuminating, they also underline just how difficult were the circumstances of filmmaking in Australia in this period as against the opportunities available to the others in Hollywood. Chauvel, “the boy from Warwick,” was born in southeast Queensland in 1897. With a family whose roots went back to the French Normans, Chauvel was well connected: his uncle was a key figure in the Australian Light Horse in World War I. This was an important first entry point to cinema and underlined the fact that Chauvel would need every connection at his disposal in the difficult project of pursuing a film career in Australia in these years.
Equally sympathetic and supportive were the various Hollywood film distributors in Sydney who were instrumental at key moments in Chauvel’s career in helping him raise the finances for his films. Nevertheless, pursuing a directing and producing role in Australia exacted a decisive toll in terms of his output and the often epic difficulties that sometimes surrounded the making of a number of his films. Altogether Chauvel made nine feature films, four wartime shorts, a wartime documentary re-edited from Soviet film, and Walkabout, a 13-episode documentary series that he produced for television for the BBC.
Working as writer, director, and producer on these, Chauvel was intimately dependent on his wife Elsa who worked as cowriter and erstwhile secretary on all these productions. Elsa herself had first worked for Chauvel as star in several of his silent films although after marriage she moved into production. Chauvel was active both before and after World War II so that his is one half of continuous output that complements the career of Ken G. Hall and Lee Robinson. The latter was to be a partner with actor Chips Rafferty, and Chauvel was central not only to that acting career but to those of Errol Flynn and Michael Pate. Chauvel’s career now appears to fall into two halves, not least because of the loss of many of the earlier films. These include Robbery under Arms (1920), The Shadow of Lightning Ridge (1920), A Jackeroo of Coolabong (1920), The Moth of Moombi (1926), Greenhide (1926), In the Wake of the Bounty (1933), Heritage (1935), Uncivilised (1936), Rangle River (1936), and Rats of Tobruk (1944).
However, it was another, mostly later, group of films whose subject matter and narrative concerned epic adventure that was frequently matched by equally epic adventures in the areas of financing and production. This work included such films as Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940), Sons of Matthew (1949), and Jedda (1955), all of which occupy the position of classics in the Australian film canon. Possibly exhausted from the sheer vicissitudes of his projects, Chauvel died in 1959. Since then, his reputation has steadily climbed. Admired in his lifetime for his sheer capacity to keep going and to make films with a highly personal stamp, he was a genuine cinematic primitive who, although naive in his political and moral outlook, nevertheless could make films that had a dynamism of theme and style that more than matched their subject matter.
CHUBB, PAUL (1949–2002). Until his death from complications of heart-related surgery, the rotund figure of Paul Chubb added intensely effective characters to films ranging from comedy to hard-boiled crime, sometimes mixing those extremes. He appeared in some 40 films—some of which were made for television—and miniseries, beginning as a policeman in The Night Prowler (1978), developing as a character actor through Hoodwink (1981)—in which Geoffrey Rush also appeared—Kitty and the Bagman (1982), a detective in Heatwave (1982), and a debt collector for organized crime in Goodbye Paradise (1983). He continued the criminal characters as Syd, a petty but, in inverse proportion, vicious character in With Love to the Person Next to Me (1987), and later changed to a flinty private detective in the comedy The Roly Poly Man (1994). He appeared in two short films directed by *Jane Campion, Passionless Moments (1983) and A Girl’s Own Story (1984). His last film was Dirty Deeds (2002), a crime film related in this way to his early and most significant films.
Other films include Bliss (1985), Takeover (1987), Danger Down Under (1988), Shotgun Wedding (1993), Cosi (1996), The Well (1997), and Road to Nhill (1997).
CINESOUND. Like Efftee Film Productions, Cinesound was a product of the early 1930s. However, unlike its rival, the company proved to have much greater stability than its erstwhile Melbourne opposition. Indeed with its “bread and butter” output of newsreels and its more prestigious output of one or two features a year, Cinesound was the closest to a Hollywood film production studio that the Australian cinema managed to produce in the period before the revival. The company’s parent was the exhibitor, Greater Union Pictures. During the silent phase of the Australian cinema, the latter built up an enviable list of interesting and entertaining films ranging from before World War I with Shepherd of the Southern Cross (1914), through substantial postwar productions including Painted Leaders (1925), The Pioneers (1926), For the Term of His Natural Life (1927) to The Adorable Outcast (1928).
Stuart Doyle who was in charge of both the exhibition and the production companies decided to reorganize the latter. Ken G. Hall, his personal assistant, assumed control of the production company and renamed it as Cinesound, a name that heralded the entry into “talking pictures.” This appointment was a shrewd move as Hall had a showman’s flair for popular entertainment and under his stewardship Cinesound failed only once—with Strike Me Lucky (1934)—to make a profit on the 16 feature films that he was to direct over the next 10 years. His first film was On Our Selection in 1932 and its success saw Hall continue making one or two features each year for screening in Greater Union cinemas across the country. Thereupon followed The Squatter’s Daughter (1933), The Silence of Dean Maitland (1934), Strike Me Lucky, Grandad Rudd (1935), Orphan of the Wilderness (1936), Thoroughbred (1936), Lovers and Loggers (1937), Tall Timbers (1937), It Isn’t Done (1937), Let George Do It (1938), The Broken Melody (1938), Dad and Dave Come to Town (1938), Gone to the Dogs (1939), Mr. Chedwortti Steps Out (1939), Come up Smiling (1939), and Dad Rudd, M.P. (1940). Hall produced all of these and, with the exception of Come up Smiling, also directed them. His style was unremarkable and unobtrusive, very much in the Hollywood classical tradition. However, Hall was no one man show and it is important to take account of the production team that he brought together. Arthur Smith and Clive Cross originated Cinesound’s sound equipment. George Heath was in charge of photography although both Walter Sully and Frank Hurley also contributed. Bill Shepherd edited, while Fred Finlay was in charge of direction for the early films. Later this fell to Eric Thompson and Alan Kenyon. Finally, Hamilton Webber wrote much of the music.
Meanwhile throughout the decade, Cinesound continued to make its weekly newsreel. The outbreak of World War II caused the interruption of feature film production and, despite high hopes, this was not to resume after the cessation of hostilities. However, the output of the weekly newsreel and the occasional Cinesound documentary was to continue, the former up until 1970. By then, Hall had long left the company. Already a veteran, he took up an offer from Frank Packer to act as general manager of the new commercial television station TCN9 Sydney, which he oversaw from 1956 until his retirement in 1965. However, even then, Hall continued as a kind of elder statesman to the new production industry that emerged around 1970, frequently drawing on business wisdom and aesthetic ideas gained in his time at Cinesound.
CITY IN FILM. Two basic aspects suggest themselves as a key to understanding the relationship between cities and cinema in Australia. The first lies in the realization that this cinema always has been produced for, has circulated across, and has been engaged at particular sites, most especially in the Australian city. Inspired by the Lumière actualities, cinematographers were at work in the streets of cities such as Melbourne and Brisbane around 1900 constructing rich, anthropological records of people, places, and movement. And whether the ostensible genre is nonfiction or fiction, such a tradition of filmmaking in urban streets, buildings, and open city spaces has come down to the present, reminding contemporary and future viewers of the living texture of particular slices of city life. Additionally, one can chart a succession of further developments in urban film production, most heavily concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne but occurring in other cities and using a repertoire of different technologies 35, 16, and 8mm film, video, and computer animation. This tradition of independent city production has given rise to a veritable archive of city films. Here, by way of example, just one can be mentioned: John Prescott’s feature Bootleg (1986) made in Brisbane, which casts that place as a noir city full of its own corruptions.
A fuller consideration of production’s insertion in Australian cities must also consider the advent of particular film studio complexes. Historically, these include Efftee in Melbourne, Pagewood in Sydney, Warner Bros. at the Gold Coast, Fox Studios in Sydney, and an intended Columbia in Melbourne (see also WARNER BROTHERS MOVIE WORLD STUDIOS). These add to city infrastructures for film production, an infrastructure that includes film schools and tertiary institutions. Another dimension of urban cinema infrastructure concerns the changing complex of spaces wherein films are accessed. The most obvious of these has, of course, to do with patterns of cinema locations both in cities and in suburbs, a history that would trace the emergence, development, and successive transformations of public cinema attendance. The venues in question include open-air cinemas in the more tropical cities, the building of chains of hardtop cinemas in urban locations, rivaling, and eventually displacing earlier forms of public entertainment and leisure. The trajectory of Australian cinema forms from hardtop stand-alone cinemas, drive-ins, cineplexes, and multiplexes have also done much to enrich the patterns of everyday life in Australian cities, both in the central districts and in the suburbs.
Over and above cinema’s physical shaping of Australian cities, there is also its virtual mediation of a population’s understanding of the Australian city. As a visual and narrative form, it has conditioned perceptions and understandings of places, showing particular pictures as “locations” for drama, for example, or narrating documentaries from a particular point of view. Thus, the Australian cinematic city is more than buildings and streets but is, instead, the arena of small as well as big time dramas of living in the city. There is, accordingly, a spectrum of filmic response ranging from the optimistic, utopian pastoralism to be found, for example, in The Kid Stakes (1927) through to the darker, less sanguine vision of The Sentimental Bloke (1919). In turn, these polar responses enable us to predict some of the generic forms of the urban film to be found in Australian cinema in the recent present. Since the revival, the favored form of this latter kind of film has been the genre of social realism. A list of representative titles would run from Three to Go (1971) through Hard Knocks (1980) and Return Home (1990) to Metal Skin (1994) in the recent present. Such films are by no means necessarily concerned with the more famous icons and tourist locations of cities such as Sydney and Melbourne but are, rather, concentrated on different geographies of the city and the living of city life whether on the streets or amid the quiet satisfactions and hidden anxieties of middle-class suburbs. What these films collectively offer is a repertoire and “structure of feeling” of the iconography of locations and encounters that give texture and significance to the audience’s own experience of Australian city life. Again, this social realism cycle varies and overlaps other genres, especially as it reveals an optimism on the one hand and a darker cynicism on the other. With the first, there is the overlapping of the musical (Star Struck [1982], Strictly Ballroom [1992]), romance (The Heartbreak Kid [1993], Muriel’s Wedding [1994]) and, especially, comedy (Death in Brunswick [1991], Spotswood [1992], and The Castle [1997]). Such films tend to mitigate the raw, harder effects of city life in terms of suggesting the presence of social enclaves, local communities, that shield against the harsher, brutal effects of urban living.
However, the Australian city film is by no means only wedded to this pole. At the other end is a vision of city life as nasty, brutish, and short. Some recent representations of this dystopian vision are Romper Stomper (1992), Idiot Box (1996), The Boys (1998), and Black Rock (1997). Indeed, a number of short distinctive cycles of this kind of film have enabled audience, producers, and critics to claim distinctive traditions of cinematic urbanism, such as a Melbourne wave of social realism whose output includes Queensland (1976), Mouth to Mouth (1978), Love Brokers (1988), Romper Stomper, and Metal Skin. Collectively, this kind of film provides a distinctive iconography of the modern Australian city. This cycle, for example, is set in the working-class Melbourne western suburbs and follows tough, hard-edged stories that concern males with no way out from nihilistic futures; those caught in the dislocations of unemployment, alienation, violence, racism, and psychological breakdown. Meanwhile, elements of this vision also attach themselves to more familiar generic forms that find city settings for their narratives. These include crime and the thriller. Coming full circle, this latter kind of urban film seeks not the everyday lives and settings of ordinary people but more spectacular urban arenas for their actions and adventures. Not surprisingly, then, in films such as Mission Impossible 2 (2000) and The Matrix (1999), the notable tourist features of Sydney including harbor, bridge, beach, and water become the markers of Sydney as a world city, a suitable arena for global finance or global crime. Thus, despite the alleged prevalence of rural myth in Australian culture, including film, the fact is that Australian cinema has been, is, and seems likely to continue to be intimately engaged with the city. See also COUNTRY.
CLARK, AL. Born in Spain, Al Clark worked in various capacities with the London magazine Time Out and the Virgin group before coproducing Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) and Aria (1987). He was executive producer for Secret Places (1984), Absolute Beginners (1986), Captive (1986), and Gothic (1986). He moved to Sydney and was appointed to the board of the Australian Film Commission from 1989 to 1992. Since then he has produced two films featuring Russell Crowe—The Crossing (1990) and Heaven’s Burning (1997)—and two directed by Stephan Elliott—the multiple award winning The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), and Eye of the Beholder (1999). In addition, he produced John Polson’s Siam Sunset (1999), The Hard Word (2002), and was executive producer for Chopper (2000), featuring Eric Bana.
CLARKE, JOHN. See entry in New Zealand section.
COLLETTE, TONI (1972– ). Toni Collette has won international acclaim for a breadth of roles across genres and national boundaries. She has been involved in acting from her teenage years. She won a scholarship to the Australian Theatre for Young People in 1989, and then studied at the National Institute for Dramatic Art in 1991–1992. While not in the mold of a “glamorous” actress, her characters are generally potent and consistent, and she is one of the most productive of recent Australian actresses. Her talent was obvious in her earliest roles: she had a small role in Spotswood (1992), for which she was nominated for an Australian Film Institute (AFI) best supporting actress award. Her role in Muriel’s Wedding (1994) as a marriage-focused, ABBA-loving heroine won the AFI Best Actress award. Since then she has been in demand both in Australia and overseas. She played in the Australian-produced The Boys (1998) and the unfortunately timed Diana and Me (1997). Her voice was used as Meg Bluegum in the children’s animated film The Magic Pudding (2000)—which also featured the voices of actors Geoffrey Rush, John Cleese, *Sam Neill, Hugo Weaving, and Jack Thompson—and followed with her role as the voices of the nurse and good witch in the United States and United Kingdom production of the animated Arabian Nights (1995). Collette played the young Lillian in the harrowing Lillian’s Story (1995), for which she won an AFI best supporting actress award. Other Australian films include This Marching Girl Thing (1994), Cosi (1996), and The Boys (1997).
Collette has been in demand outside Australia. In the British Velvet Goldmine (1998), she played the discarded wife of a glitzy rock-star. In The Sixth Sense (1999), she played the worried mother Lynn Sear.
In 2002, she played in four films that display the versatility in roles and nationalities, and the trend to a global, rather than a national cinema: Changing Lanes, About a Boy, Dirty Deeds, and The Hours. Changing Lanes is a thriller set in New York; Collette plays Michelle. In the British comedy About a Boy, she plays Fiona. Dirty Deeds is a crime/comedy film set in Sydney, Australia; Collette plays the wife of mobster Barry Ryan. The drama The Hours was made in the United States, about Virginia Woolf, and stars Nicole Kidman with Collette as Kitty. Japanese Story (2003) won Collette an AFI best actress award as a geologist who falls in love with the son of a Japanese shareholder in an extensive mining interest in Western Australia.
Other films include: The Pallbearer (1996), Emma (1996), James Gang (1997), The Clockwatchers (1997), Velvet Goldmine (1998), 81/2 Women (1999), Hotel Splendide (2000), and Shaft (2000).
COLOSIMO, VINCE (1966– ). Vince Colosimo plays in roles that are seemingly worlds apart, and his ability in playing these roles is evident in the award of Australian Star of the Year (2002) by the Australian Movie Convention. In Lantana (2001), he was the househusband Nik Daniels, resident father to the children, while his wife worked. He won the best supporting actor in the 2001 Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards for this role. He successfully changed sexual orientation in Walking on Water (2002), where he played the gay Charlie, participating in passionate scenes with his lover, for which he was nominated for best actor in the 2002 AFI awards. Before that he had been at the other end of the spectrum, playing the thug Neville in Chopper (2000), and then larger-than-life Frank in the comedy The Wog Boy (2000), following with Dimitri in The Nuggett (2002) and Detective Mick Kelly in The Hard Word (2002), a film about ex-prisoners who are qualified butchers.
Colosimo’s first film appearance was in the coming-of-age film Moving Out (1983), where he starred as Gino, the son of immigrant parents struggling to find a balance between the wishes of his parents, and the pull of contemporary Australian culture. He received an AFI nomination in the 1982 awards as best lead actor for that role. He played Vince in Street Hero (1984), and then dropped out of commercial films to focus on a television career until The Wog Boy, and he has now returned, at least for the moment, to the big screen.
COMEDY. The first comedy from the early part of the century, Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke (1919), has some elements in common with the more recent ocker films of the 1970s in that it reflects the Australian context, which differentiates the film from imported material. The use of the vernacular is a comic element, as is the drinking and gambling that were part of mateship rituals up to the late 1970s, and the urban, working-class milieu. At the same time—and in contrast to the ocker films—the bush and its inhabitants, and its particular characters, situations, and innocence, became suitable subjects for a kind of affectionate comedy. The “Dad and Dave” stories, where the bush legend coalesced, appeared in the national magazine, The Bulletin. The bush character was defined by way of contrast to the “gilded youths” from the city in A. B. Patterson’s poem “The Man from Ironbark.” The country innocent was much beloved of Australian audiences, and was seized on by filmmakers like Ken Hall, resulting in a stream of films from 1920 (On Our Selection) to 1940 (Dad Rudd, M.P.). For Australian audiences, the country bumpkin encapsulated the innocence and naiveté of a hard-working country life, compared with the apparent sophistication and experience of the city. The happy conclusion, affirming the value of a simple family life outside the corrupting influence of the metropolis, is a feature that appears in later films of the century. As well, other traces of this genre are apparent in later films like Crocodile Dundee (1985), albeit reflecting the globalized nature of the film audience in the comparison of the Australian bush with metropolitan New York.
A tangent in the development of Australian comedy was the ocker films of the 1970s, which contrasted strongly in many ways with the country naiveté framed in the earlier films. These films emerged in immediate response to the tax concessions for filmmakers that drove the revival of the industry in 1969. The significant films were The Naked Bunyip (1970), Stork (1971), Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), Alvin Purple (1973), and Number 96 (1974). These films showcased a version of the language called “strine,” which included copious mention of the nonformal terms for bodily functions, sex, women, and drinking.
Recent comedies have clear links to the earlier bucolic films, where the “little man” stands up to powerful institutions, and with the help of the community, overcomes. Spotswood (1992) shows the ordinary person, supported by family and communal solidarity, standing up to innovations in industrial rationalization. A similar narrative underpins The Castle (1997), and The Man Who Sued God (2001), which starred Billy Connelly as the David taking on the Goliath of insurance companies. The background for the “little man” theme in Crackerjack (2002) is a metropolitan bowls club, threatened by irrelevance and a poker machine licensee.
Another comic style is derived by taking character and situations to extremes, and then allowing them to interact. Thus comedy occurs through an exaggeration of the traits that exist in reality. Crackers (1998) tells the story of the Christmas gathering of a dysfunctional extended suburban family, with characters who do little more than hold a distorting mirror up to certain traits in Australian culture. Doing Time for Patsy Cline (1997) is a gentler comedy, drawing on the inequities of social life in an Australian setting of country music, rural life, and the less idyllic drug scene. The characters in Cosi (1996) come from a psychiatric institution and are to put on a play, drawing on a convention from Marat/Sade (1967), but there the resemblance almost ends, except that the offbeat comedy parallels events happening in the lives of the characters.
Comedy thrives on taking people from one environment and placing them in another—the “fish-out-of-water” narrative—and then watching the situations unfold. Australia’s most successful film, both in Australia and in the United States, was Crocodile Dundee (1986), with Crocodile Dundee II (1988) following closely. These films revolve around the relocation of a country innocent, though still wise, from the Australian outback to cosmopolitan USA. Within Australia, the reality of a multicultural society provides similar “fish-out-of-water” narratives. They’re a Weird Mob (1966) tells the story of a recently arrived Italian journalist who works as a builder’s laborer and learns, through many comic situations, something of Australian society and culture. In a different vein, but arising from the narratives of difference, is the black comedy Death in Brunswick (1991), where cemeteries become sites for comedy. In a suburb of Melbourne populated by Greek and Turkish families, the Australian character played by *Sam Neill is drawn into the feuds between warring ethnic families, a war that involves the elements of death and dying (see also ETHNIC REPRESENTATION). The Wog Boy (2000) takes the stereotypes of multicultural Australia to the extremes when they become comic, once again playing on the juxtaposition of cultures and idiom for the comic effect. (“Some people think I know farck nothing. But I know farck all!”). Fat Pizza (2003) continues the trend, less successfully.
A less visible subgenre of comedy is romantic comedy. To some extent, the subgenre has been the domain of new women directors, such as Emma-Kate Groghan (Love and Other Catastrophes [1996]), Megan Simpson Huberman (Dating the Enemy [1996]) and Cherie Nowlan (Thank God He Met Lizzie [1997]). Love is a hectic pastiche of events in the life of a university student, collapsing the drama of student life into 24 hours, bringing together mismatched couples into new formations for a happy denouement. Dating the Enemy involves characters switching from one body to another, as well as switching gender. The comedy arises once again from “fish-out-of-water” narrative; in this case the strangeness is not in the geographic location but in the physical body. Lizzie tells the story of a man torn between two women. The problem is that he is about to marry one of them, and the comic situations arise out of a series of flashbacks, which compare the women.
COMING OF AGE FILMS. See MATURATION/COMING OF AGE FILMS.
COMMONWEALTH FILM UNIT (CFU). The Commonwealth Film Unit was the de facto name given to the Australian government film production body between about 1956 and 1973 when its name changed to Film Australia. The organization had a long ancestry going back to at least 1911 when the federal government appointed a photographer and filmmaker to make information films. These tended to focus on such subjects as the produce of Australia’s primary industries and were intended both to promote agriculture and migration from the United Kingdom. After the end of World War II, the government decided to act on the advice of John Grierson and reestablish the film body on a larger scale with a twin brief, both to produce films for particular government departments and agencies and also to produce films in the more general, national interest.
Known informally as the Film Division, an arm of the News and Information Bureau of the Department of the Interior, the body found itself referred to as the Commonwealth Film Unit from 1956 onward. The chief presence at the Unit in these years was Stanley Hawes, who had learned his craft and its supporting ideology at the British Post Office film division in the 1930s. He followed Grierson to the Canadian National Film Board toward the end of that decade and later came to Australia to help set up and run the newly expanded film production instrument. Under Hawes’ leadership over the next two decades, the CFU was responsible for the making of over 400 information films, most of them consisting of a single reel but with one or two running to feature length. The most notable of the latter was The Queen in Australia (1954), which was, undoubtedly, its most prestigious (and among its dullest) films. Overall, this period of Australian history was marked by postwar affluence and consensus and this found articulation and expression in many films of the period. The pillars of this affluence were, variously, those of material development, social and physical improvement, a consensual populace, a suburban society, and renewed and expanding consumption. The preferred mode of film at the unit, at least until the mid-1960s, was that of the classical documentary style. Such an approach bespoke not just the legacy of Grierson’s role in establishing the expanded film production effort but was also suited to a consensualist view of Australian society. The most important feature of these films was undoubtedly the use of an expository voice, “the voice of God.” Always confident and authoritative, the speaker is invariably male, neither obviously young, old, nor ethnic, and apparently classless in accent. In other words, as a means of affirming and maintaining its authority, this voice is impersonal, objective, acting on behalf of the general interest, and able where necessary to conjure up voices as well as images in support of its exposition. Thus, for example, The Earth Reveals (1960) calls up both images of the new mining technologies now in operation as well as a controlled cacophony of voices of miners and others at work in these fields.
However, the consensus implied by these films was beginning to erode by the early 1960s and this was paralleled by shifts in the style of film emerging from the CFU. The obvious driving force for this change in the preferred mode of filmmaking lay not in any ideological determination to reflect the new, emerging mood and tone of the society. Rather, it came about in part because of the advent of new filmmaking technologies and the desire on the part of the unit to remain contemporary in this arena. Thus, color became increasingly common in its films and, toward the end of the 1950s, films such as Paper Run were made in a Cinemascope format. However, the advent of new sound equipment and film techniques fractured the style of the classical documentary’s reign at the CFU. Meanwhile, the CFU itself was changing. In 1962, it moved to more spacious premises specially designed to meet its needs. Its budgets rose sharply over the next dozen years and the political/bureaucratic attacks that had dogged it now fell away. New younger staff was recruited and the unit briefly won a reputation as Australia’s de facto national film school.
The paradigmatic film of this phase was From the Tropics to the Snow (1964), a reflexive film about the CFU itself and the impossible and irreconcilable claims of people and place involved in making a film about Australia. Paralleling the social shifts in Australian society toward a more pluralist outlook, the film used its more flexible sound resources to create and hold together the competing claims of both tropics and snow and everything in between. However, this was not the only impressive work to emerge at this time and mention should be made of two anthropological series to do with indigenous peoples—People of the Western Desert and Towards Baruya Manhood—which were completed in the late 1960s. Completing these were the fictional trilogy of the early 1970s—Michael, Judy, and Toula—and another trilogy dealing with social outsiders who were also remarkable visionaries—The Man Who Can’t Stop (1973), Mr. Symbol Man (1974), and God Knows Why but It Works (1975). The change of name to Film Australia in 1973 was prophetic of other changes in Australia itself and in the film organization. The oil crisis of 1973–1994 heralded the disruption of the postwar consensus and the commencement of a neoliberalism that would shortly begin to affect staff levels and budgets at the unit.
CONNOLLY, ROBERT (1967– ). Robert Connolly entered the filmmaking world as associate producer on the poorly received comedy All Men Are Liars (1995). This film was the first in a series that interrogated the representation of gender and relationships between different genders. He produced the dramatic The Boys (1997), depicting the activities of a violent and misogynist group of brothers, including David Wenham, and The Monkey’s Mask (2000), a crime thriller where the protagonists are lesbian. He was consultant on Better Than Sex (2000), a light-hearted examination of the growth of something other than sex—the title suggests that it cannot be named—between two people, also starring Wenham. He then broke with this mold, writing and directing The Bank (2001), a thriller revolving around one man’s desire for revenge on the bank that caused his father to commit suicide. The film was nominated for nine Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards, including best film, best director, best actor, and best original screenplay, which it won.
CORNELL, JOHN (1941– ). John Cornell is the silent partner in the Paul Hogan success story. As a producer for the television news magazine program “A Current Affair” in the 1970s, John Cornell spotted Hogan in the new talent show “New Faces,” where Hogan reached the finals with a blistering take-off of the show itself and its judges. Cornell contracted Hogan to appear on “A Current Affair,” where he became the resident comic. He then produced the television series, “The Paul Hogan Show” in 1977, acting as well as Hogan’s foil, “Strop.” He was the cowriter and producer of the immensely successful Crocodile Dundee (1986), and was the director of Crocodile Dundee II (1988) and the light-hearted Almost an Angel (1990), also starring Paul Hogan, which he also produced. There is no doubt that the success of the Paul Hogan character, as well as the astute business decisions surrounding the character, are due not only to Hogan, but also to John Cornell.
COUNTRY. Australian filmmakers and others will not use the term “country” for that which is outside the larger cities, for rural and even remote areas. Instead, the preferred terms are “the bush” and “the outback.” Nevertheless, the intention is the same—to designate that part of the territory where the presence of land, nature, isolation, and, sometimes, danger, are the realities of cinematic life. As a “white settler society,” Australia has shared in a common Western cultural legacy, itself part of the ideology of colonialism, having to do with the myth of the “frontier.” Thus, the frontier is that border between civilization and barbarity, between the land as garden and the land as wilderness. However if the country as a site of cinema shares elements with “frontier” films in South Africa, Canada, and, especially, the United States, then it also partakes of a far older tradition to do with dualities, binary opposites between the idea of the country and the city. In such a linkage, the one is the opposite, shadow or complement of the other. Armed with these ideas, one can begin with the assertion that in cinema, the country has been seminal in shaping the Australian imagination. Two films of the midcentury made by the same director, Charles Chauvel, can ground these observations. Sons of Matthew (1949) is set in the country and is an epic narrative of heroic men wresting a living in the bush against such natural catastrophes as bushfires and cyclones. In this kind of film, generally, the realities of colonial appropriation are displaced by constituting the land as an empty space populated only by natural challenges and catastrophes. In overcoming these and wresting a living in such a place, the settlers are metaphysically legitimated. Such a story of “frontier” achievement is a narrative of the manly independence and fortitude that transforms a wilderness into a garden. What is almost entirely missing from the cinematic account, except for the recent present, is the registration of those who were displaced in this process of colonial settlement. However, Chauvel’s next film, Jedda (1955), rebalances the account. Giving narrative prominence to such landscapes as rain forests, desert, and pastoral countryside, the film is concerned to dramatically juxtapose liberal white settlers and both uprooted and nomadic Aborigines. However, these two films with their assorted rural types hardly exhaust the repertoire of figures found in the Australian films of country. Instead, the checklist should also include rich squatters, poor selectors, and others, manual laborers of all kinds, miners, drovers, small farmers, shopkeepers, and shearers.
What should be apparent in this list, as is also the case in the two Chauvel films, is the masculinist emphasis of many Australian films set in the country. Even in early Australian feature films, the narrative structures could range from the countryman as hero, in the shape of settler, drover, and shearer to the figure as villain embodied in the form of villainous overseer, bushman, and so on. These polarities were embodied perfectly in a cycle of films about bushrangers running from around the turn of the century until 1918 when they were banned. Recurring right down to the 2003 remake of Ned Kelly, such films focus on an ambiguity of the central figure as both hero and outlaw. However, the bushranger/Western is not the only generic variation that Australian films of country have been capable of.
Indeed, here it is relevant to mention a cycle of films made by overseas companies in Australia between the 1940s and 1960s that mostly subscribed to the myth of the Australian rural landscape as the site of epic adventure. Films in this group included The Overlanders (1946), Kangaroo (1952), Bitter Springs (1950), Smiley (1956), The Back of Beyond (1954), Robbery under Arms (1957), The Shiralee (1957), and The Sundowners (1960). Nor is this tradition completely dormant as The Man from Snowy River (1982) demonstrated. Hailed as a break from the tradition of the period film and its overtones of nationalism and nostalgia, the film had a narrative rhythm and sense of movement more familiarly encountered in Hollywood. Like the Hollywood Western, the film’s ideological project was the reintegration of masculinity and landscape.
An opposite strain to this tradition has been that of comedy. Here, two particular cycles of bucolic comedy surrounding the figures of both the Hayseeds and the Rudd family have been important. Nor were the two exactly alike. For after the farce and broad comedy of the former, the latter combined comedy with a degree of what passed for realism with an enduring stress on the hardship and heroism involved in wresting a life from the bush. Thus, films such as Dad and Dave Come to Town (1938) and Dad Rudd, M.P. (1940) are comedies of country, pitting rural figures and values against those of the city and civilization. Arguably, this “fish out of water” theme inaugurated in these rural comedies continues. It can, for example, be seen as one powerful mechanism behind the ocker comedies of the 1970s where the comic crassness of, say, Barry McKenzie is implicitly seen as testimony to Australia’s condition of hinterland as against the metropolitan centeredness of London and Britain. In 1986, Crocodile Dundee made this link patently apparent in comically juxtaposing the bush outlook of the central figure with New York as the embodiment of civilization.
However, beyond these occasional connections, the primary and most consistent use of landscape occurred in the features of the period film cycle that began in 1976 with Picnic at Hanging Rock. What this group of films looked at primarily was country so that their characteristic register was landscape, their vision was one of light, and their primary emphasis was that of the physical. Additionally, many of these such as Gallipoli (1981) deliberately interlaced this with nationalistic overtones. In other words, land and landscape were central to this ideological undertaking. Overall, though, the Australian countryside has tended to be viewed in three distinct but related ways in films of the 1970s and early 1980s. First, in the art and period film, country and landscape become the site for an obvious nostalgia. The passing of a kind of traditional society is embedded in a country background in films such as Sunday Too Far Away (1975), The Picture Show Man (1977), and The Irishman (1978). Secondly, beginning with Hanging Rock, there is also a cycle that extends both backward and forward constructing a more existential connection and encounter between individual, group, and land. Such a cycle sometimes suggested the notion of a powerful, mysterious, and archaic nature, menace, and sublimity that is embodied in landscape. Some representative titles include Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Long Weekend (1978), The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978), Gallipoli (1981), and We of the Never Never (1982). In turn, linked directly to this sense of rural foreboding was that of a fear and dread of dissolution, a descent into nature from which there was little or no return. Films embodying this nightmare include The Back of Beyond (1954), Jedda, Wake in Fright (1971), Little Boy Lost (1978), and Walkabout (1971). This same sense of something alien and, often, menacing even extends to several films in which the country town is represented including Country Town (1971), The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), Shame (1987), and Road to Nhill (1997). In summary, then, country has acted and continues to act as a powerful polarity in Australian cinema.
CRACKNELL, RUTH (1925–2002). Ruth Cracknell first appeared in film as Mrs. Gaspen in the Australian Smiley Gets a Gun (1959), starring Chips Rafferty. From 1962 to 1975, she appeared in many television series where she had her greatest impact, especially as Margaret Whitlam in The Dismissal (1983) and the impossible mother Maggie Beare in Mother and Son (1983). Her film career was less successful, with some notable exceptions. She starred as Rose Dougherty in Spider & Rose (1994), a comedy directed and written by Bill Bennett, about a road trip that an ambulance driver and an old lady undertake. Earlier, in Gillian Armstrong’s The Singer and the Dancer (1977), Cracknell starred as the older woman who never speaks to her daughter and detests everything about her. She played a strong supporting role as Mrs. Heather Newby in Fred Schepisi’s award-winning The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978). As Doris Bannister in Jim Sharman’s The Night, the Prowler (1978), she played the mother in the dark, seething, and comic undercurrents of suburban life. She was nominated for best leading actress by the Australian Film Institute for this role. While Toni Collette played the role of the young Lilian Singer in Lilian’s Story (1995), Cracknell portrayed the adult, released from a mental institution after 40 years. The film addresses issues of physical and mental abuse, and tells of the triumph of the human spirit over the worst adversity.
Other films are That Lady from Peking (1970), The Best of Friends (1981), Molly (1983), Emerald City (1988), Kokoda Crescent (1989), Joey (1997).
CRAWFORD, HECTOR (1913–1992). Hector Crawford was a dynamic force in radio program production, which he repeated in television with his company Crawford Productions. In the 1960s and 1970s, this “Hollywood on the Yarra” was Australia’s de facto film school and was responsible for teaching many hundreds of actors, directors, writers, and others their craft.
CRIME. The hard-boiled crime fiction is, in the historical spectrum, a more recent genre. Goodbye Paradise (1983) re-creates Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles of the 1940s in Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland, in the 1970s and 1980s, with a culture that paralleled the corruption and crime that was a feature of Los Angeles. A corruption inquiry in Queensland a few years later showed that the film had certain parallels in reality. The film registers a kind of earthy distaste of the corrupt values of the metropolis, and sees the alternative beach cultures as little better, but unlike other films in the action/adventure genre, for example, nothing was suggested by way of contrast. However, the film deviates from its American model in the denouement, when the lead character wanders, in a state of alcoholic meltdown, into a fight between rebels and the army. Here the plot resembles an early James Lee Burke novel—although not sourced from that—rather than the usual Raymond Chandler novel.
Bryan Brown has been an effective actor in crime films, beginning with The Empty Beach (1985), based on a novel by the Australian crime writer Peter Corris. The detective, Cliff Hardy (Brown), is a tough, no-nonsense guy in the manner of earlier models, but unlike in other films of the genre, he has no private narrator who is able—through direct explanation to the audience—to offer some relief from and explanation of the “tough-guy” character. Thus, we see only a hard-bitten, cryptic character who appears to overreact. Brown continued with lead roles in the caper films Two Hands (1999) and Dirty Deeds (2002), both of which juxtapose serious criminal acts with comic or endearing family scenes, following Pulp Fiction (1994). In Two Hands, Brown becomes the “T-shirts, shorts-and-flip-flops” criminal boss Pando, the epitome of the casual, working class, beer-drinking, joke-cracking Australian thug. He is also a devoted family man, moving easily from making origami with his young son to discussing the shooting of a recalcitrant crook. There is no hard-boiled detective here, just a gang of medium-level criminals who end up dying at the hands of a young streetkid, whose friend they inadvertently killed. The criminals operate seemingly without intervention from an effective police force represented generally through the tough, cynical detective. In Getting Square (2003), the detective is corrupt. Satisfaction lies in the personal extinction of people who are unutterably evil, who have no respect for the lives of anyone. The karma of living unethically strikes the corrupt John Kreisky (Bryan Brown) yet again in Risk (2002). Here, the insurance adjustor Kreisky and his lover, the lawyer Louise Roncoli (Claudia Karvan), fleece the company Kreisky works for in an increasingly complex swindle, that goes wrong when Ben Madigan (Tom Long) has second thoughts.
An earlier film, Grievous Bodily Harm (1988), like The Empty Beach and Goodbye Paradise, constructs a social logic where redemption is not possible at the social level through a newfound commitment to community values; rather redemption is a personal catharsis, within the contemporary world and not some other. Crime and the criminal world is outside the realm of normal experience for most people, but a simple sequence of events can lead a normal, relatively well-adjusted person into the upside-down and frightening world of crime and the grey zone between those who populate it and those who fight it. That grey zone is filled with ambivalent motives and actions.
Two other films fall into this genre, and both are based on the same true-life event. Phillip Noyce’s Heatwave (1982) and Donald Crombie’s The Killing of Angel Street (1981) were inspired by the death of investigative reporter Juanita Nielsen while exposing the corruption surrounding the development of a block of older-style houses in favor of expensive high-rise apartments. The developers have no mitigating traits, and are involved with criminal enforcers, corrupt police, compromised lawyers, and greedy politicians. On the other hand, the residents of Angel Street are sweetly innocent. The city is once again the site of corruption, and those who indulge in it are protected from prosecution because of the privileges of power.
Other films in the genre include The Surfer (1988), The Custodian (1994), and The Hard Word (200x).
CROCODILE DUNDEE (1986). Crocodile Dundee is the most popular Australian film to be exported to the United States, grossing US$175 million in the first four months at the American box office and a further US$70 million in American rentals alone. In Australia, it was the best box-office performer in 1986, as was Crocodile Dundee II in 1988. Dundee remains the best box-office performer of all time in Australia, grossing $47.7 million, three times the box-office of the critically acclaimed Muriel’s Wedding (1994) and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). Its total gross was US$350 million, the 10th largest in history. Despite being nominated for, and winning, awards overseas, Dundee was not nominated for any awards by the Australian industry, perhaps reflecting the “high-culture” pretensions of that industry. In 1987, the American Academy nominated the film and writers Paul Hogan, Ken Shadie, and John Cornell for the best screenplay written directly for the screen. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) nominated Paul Hogan as the best actor, and the three writers for the best original screenplay. The film won the B.M.I. film music award in 1987, and the Golden Screen (Germany) best film award. In the same year, Paul Hogan won a Golden Globe award for best actor, and Linda Kozlowski was nominated for best performance by an actress in a supporting role.
Although the humor wears thin for audiences today, in 1986 the film crystallized and codified a new Australian legend in the person of the laconic, weather-beaten, self-deprecating crocodile hunter Crocodile Dundee, spinner of the tall tales to entertain and enthrall unsuspecting visitors and tourists, such as American journalist Sue Charlton (Linda Kozlowski). After experiencing his expertise in the tropical wetlands of Australia, she persuades him to accompany her back to New York. He is the naïve and not-quite-innocent outback icon transferred to the urban jungle of Manhattan, where his skills and understanding of human nature put him in interesting and comic situations. Research had suggested that the character of Dundee would be accepted immediately, and the excellent script and release timing ensured the film would be immensely popular.
The sequels, Crocodile Dundee II (1988) and Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles (2001) did not enjoy quite the same success. While Dundee II enjoyed good box office support, the third film just covered costs at the American box office.
CROCODILE DUNDEE II (1988). Crocodile Dundee II is the fourth most successful Australian film at the Australian box office, taking $24.9 million, and the second most successful at the American box office, taking US$109.3 million. Its success, though, was measured by audience response rather than in critical acclaim. The narrative is similar to that of the original, in that the comedy arises out of the clash of certain, exaggerated cultures existing in modern USA and outback Australia. We see, for example, Mick Dundee fishing in New York Harbor, using dynamite. The plot revolves around the drug trade, photos of killings, the kidnapping of Mick’s girlfriend, Sue Charlton (Linda Kozlowski), her rescue, a cunning plan designed to catch the mobsters through outwitting them back in outback Australia, and a denouement where Linda, Mick, and their friends return to a state of stability and happiness. While not living up to the novelty of the original, the film remains a warm-hearted adventure, popular in both Australia and the United States, and in northern Europe. The film won a German Golden Screen award in 1988.
CROWE, RUSSELL (1964– ). Russell Crowe was born on 7 April 1964 in New Zealand, still maintains his New Zealand nationality, and holds a New Zealand passport. He moved to Australia when he was three, until moving back to New Zealand at 14. He moved again to Australia in his late teens. His acting career began with successful stage appearances as Eddy in The Rocky Horror Stage Show in New Zealand, and he starred in Blood Brothers in 1988. The play attracted enthusiastic reviews, and New Zealand Women’s Weekly interviewed him in 1989. His first film was Prisoners of the Sun (1990)—also known as Blood Oath—concerning the Japanese mass executions of (mainly Australian) prisoners of war in World War II on the island of Ambon. In one of the worst atrocities of the war, Australian POWs were tied together at the hands, and then, as a group, were made to coil up like a neatly coiled rope, when they were doused in fuel, and incinerated. Crossing (1990) and Proof (1991) followed. In his first starring role in Crossing, he was nominated for best actor in a lead role at the 1990 Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards for his performance as Johnny, the country boy dealing with feelings of love he has for a girl left behind when he moved to the city. A 1991 AFI award for best supporting actor resulted from Proof, where Crowe worked with Hugo Weaving to explore reality and the nature of truth through photographs taken by a blind person. The film was exhibited at Cannes, giving Crowe international exposure. Crowe had a supporting role in Spotswood (1991)—which preceded Proof—a comedy where the practical and human effects of downsizing return to confront the efficiency expert.
In Hammers over the Anvil (1991), Crowe played East Driscoll, a laconic Australian horse-trainer who falls in love with the aristocratic, already married, Grace. Driscoll tries to drag her away from the marriage, with tragic results. Crowe won the Best Actor award at the 1993 Seattle International Film Festival for this film, and for Romper Stomper (1992). Before filming Romper Stomper, Crowe worked with director David Elfick on Love in Limbo (1993), playing Arthur, a Welsh factory supervisor looking over young Ken, who is desperately trying to lose his virginity, while Arthur learns some Australian virtues. Romper Stomper, a socially critical film, signaled a different direction for Crowe. As Hando, the leader of a skinhead gang in Melbourne, he exhibits the mindless violence of Kubrick’s Alex, couched in racist ideology and practice. Crowe’s role won him the best lead actor award at the 1992 AFI awards and the best male actor award by the Film Critics Circle of Australia. The Sum of Us (1994) placed Crowe in the exact opposite role, that of a homosexual son’s changing relationship with his father, Harry (Jack Thompson), both of whom are coming to terms with, and enjoying, the potential of their individual and common lives.
Turning his attention to the United States, Crowe starred with Sharon Stone in The Quick and the Dead (1995), followed by the science-fiction film Virtuosity (1995), playing a computer-generated killer opposite Denzel Washington. Crowe’s next film, L.A. Confidential (1997), allowed him to reach his potential as a character with a questionable integrity, the thuglike detective Bud White. In the same year, he played opposite Youki Kudoh in Heaven’s Burning, an underrated Australian road movie. This film redraws the Australian mise-en-scene and populates it with a cast of misfits, deviants, no-hopers, and outlaws. Three out of four of its father-son polarities are dysfunctional and the other characters are unable to be integrated into a myth of multicultural celebration. While Crowe takes the Australian antihero to uncharted levels of passivity, the arresting Kudoh transmogrifies Midori from bride, to hostage, to bank robber and romantic outlaw, leaving Hollywood heroines gasping in her wake. Crowe then played in three films—Breaking Up (1997), the Disney production Mystery, Alaska (1999), and The Insider (1999)—before the award-winning role of Maximus in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), for which he won an Oscar and a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award. Yet this achievement was overshadowed by his gripping and powerful portrayal of the Nobel prize-winning mathematician and schizophrenic John Nash in Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001), for which he was nominated for an Oscar and an American Film Institute award. He followed this up with the lead role of Captain Jack Aubrey in the award-winning, Peter Weir-directed Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
Although Crowe is famous for his acting ability, he has no time for the games of Hollywood, and prefers to live in Australia when he is not working. He married his long-time girlfriend Danielle Spencer in 2003.