I’m putting Grant through an Australian-cinema crash course – we recently watched two of my all-time favorite movies, Gallipoli and My Brilliant Career, both of which he cryptically assessed as “weird” – and we stumbled across On the Beach showing on cable. Not really an Australian movie, even though it’s set in Melbourne, it stars Gregory Peck and Anthony Perkins (“Least convincing Australian ever,” I thought when I saw him, but that was before Fred Astaire appeared as a soused Aussie scientist – and I thought no one could give Robert Mitchum a run for the title). Despite the peppy title, it’s actually a grim, sobering movie set after a nuclear war that has annihilated everyone in the world except for Australia – and the radiation is drifting Down Under, due to arrive in five months or so. Fuel’s strictly rationed, so the streets are filled with bicyclists, electric trams, and horses (get used to it, folks, once the machine breaks), and there’s a tense atmosphere of joviality plastering over the impending doom. The movie’s not as effective as it could be in building the tension – I couldn’t help thinking what it would be like to know that you were the last people left alive in the world, and you wouldn’t be for much longer, but that dread too often took a backseat to the manufactured romance between Peck, as an American submarine commander, and Ava Gardner as the boozy floozy he’s fixed up with. Weirdly, it feels a bit like From Here to Eternity, what with the parallel romances -- young and wispy Perkins/Montgomery Clift (Perkins a little harder to swallow as a military man only because he’s playing an officer) snuggling domestically with a fresh-faced Donna Anderson/Donna Reed, and Peck/Burt Lancaster as the younger man’s surrogate father in an adulterous affair with a lush who’s got something of a reputation. (Even Astaire’s role is not unlike that of Eternity’s crooner, Frank Sinatra.)
As you’d expect from an era when this scenario was not out of the question (and the destruction of all life on earth was still a relatively new concept to wrap your mind around), it’s a wee bit heavy-handed toward the end. The shots of desolate streets, with not so much as a starling stirring, are very effective, but I could have done without the blaring music heralding the Salvation Army banner that reads: “There is still time… brother.” I almost want to see a remake of this that would play up the tension more, although no doubt the modern version would fill those desolate streets with rotting corpses. (And who would you even show that to these days to have any effect? Kim Jong-Il?)
We found another Aussie film, one I had fond
memories of, on
one of Grant’s myriad movie channels.
When I saw Phar Lap (about
Australia's most famous racehorse, who died in suspicious circumstances
shortly after coming to race in America) in 1983, in
my pre-critical and horsey phase, I
thought it was brilliant. (Also, I was
12.) I believe I lamented in my review
of Seabiscuit that the
only good
horse-racing film so far was Phar Lap. Let me retract that statement upon my more
mature viewing of the movie. It may as
well be Seabiscuit for all the
subtlety and nuance it displays. It’s
your standard uplifting sports tale, complete with slo-mo sequences
with
triumphant music swelling in the background.
I actually got embarrassed watching it, not only because I’d
raved about
it to Grant and now I looked like a fool, but also because I was
cringing to
even be watching this treacle.
A trite romantic comedy, Danny Deckchair had great
potential as a quirky movie about a Sydney slacker (Rhys Ifans, who
seems
congenitally suited to playing aimless and amiable) who, for lack of
anything
better to do, attaches several large, helium-filled balloons to his
lawn chair
and takes flight. The movie crashes
shortly after Ifans’ Danny does, in a small town in the Australian
countryside,
where a lonely meter maid (Miranda Otto) inexplicably takes him in. Naturally, the affable purposelessness that
made Danny a… well, loser is such a
harsh word… in the city makes him the life of the small town and wins
Otto’s
heart (while his lying, ambitious city girlfriend basks in the
attention his
disappearance has brought her – isn't that just like them
evil city folk?). It’s all
so very predictable that it could be an American film (and, frankly, I
would be
remiss if I didn’t point out that the story – at least the part about
attaching
balloons to a lawn chair – is based on the exploits of an American man;
I mean,
come on – it takes American ingenuity to think of a brilliant idea like
that). It's a little disheartening to find out
that Australians evidently mythologize the small-town purity of heart
the way Americans do; on the other hand, I am reheartened to find out
that Australians enjoy a good pancake breakfast as much as we do.
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