In the 1920's of Australia, there had been steep competition among radio hams to find ways of achieving synchronous sound on film or on disc, without infringing upon the watertight patents of the American companies. Eventually, a young radio engineer who hailed from Tasmania; Arthur Carrington Smith, designed and built sound-on-film equipment that would become a major factor in the upsurge of film production in Australia during the early Thirties and after. He would perfect it by 1931 and Stuart Doyle's assistant, Ken G.Hall, supported it emphatically, Doyle was finally won over to the new sound system and set up Cinesound as a subsidiary of Union Theaters. It was the very depth of the Depression, when the rate of unemployment in Australia was over thirty-percent of the work force. The theaters were empty and the company was mortgaged to the banks. It seemed an impossible time to start anything.
Doyle was persistent and possessed a showman's prowess, and wanted a feature film made out of the comedy On Our Selection, which focused on a farm family and was a stage hit for Bert Bailey (who played the original Dad Rudd) and Edmund Duggan for two decades. Without ever being officially designated as such, Hall suddenly found himself as both director and general manager of the company as well as the managing editor of the weekly newsreel Cinesound Review which Doyle wanted organized - while Hall was still on location actually making On Our Selection (1932).
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| Based on the Dad and Dave stories of Steele Rudd, these are the farmers via the dell - On Our Selection (1932) |
Despite the film's anemic budget and being shot with antiquated lights and camera in a sound studio set in all places - a skating rink, On Our Selection would go on to become an overwhelming box-office success, out-grossing any other film from whatever source released in Australia up to and well beyond the time. It was also released in England, as all the Cinesound features were to be; for English distribution it's title was reworked as Down on the Farm.
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| John Longden and Jocelyn Howarth in the intense Silence of Dean Maitland (1934) |
It was solely on the back of this film's success that the famed Cinesound was established, for its profits were plowed back into technical equipment and studio renovations. So were those of the two highly successful films that immediately followed, 1933's The Squatter's Daughter, also a Bailey and Duggan stage production which received many paeans for its bushfire climax, and The Silence of Dean Maitland (1934), based on Maxwell Grey's 19th century novel; set in fictionalized Isle of Wight, it conveys the story of a parson's torrid love affair that results in a scandalous pregnancy. Stuart Doyle was reaping a fruitful three-way harvest from production, distribution and exhibition, particularly the last - the parent company controlled all three aspects of the industry. Cinesound became the firm base for Sydney production through the Thirties, serving its own needs and those of independents. It slowly built up a well-trained and adroit permanent crew which never had to face being laid off after each film finished production, as happened in America and elsewhere.
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| It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that Thring. |
Cinesound would be the studio where Charles Chauvel, the nephew of General Sir Harry Chauvel, the Australian army General, produced his very first sound feature film, the semi-documentary In the Wake of the Bounty (1933) in which Errol Flynn made his acting debut as Fletcher Christian, Flynn interestingly enough was a lineal descendant of the real Fletcher Christian. Chauvel returned much later to make his two hit films, the outstanding cavalry picture Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940) and Sons of Matthew in 1949, filmed on location in idyllic Queensland; the story of the pioneering O'Riordan family. Naturally, Cinesound studios already had competition from F.W. Thring's Efftee Films in Melbourne, given their cutting-edge, imported American optical sound gear. And there were more opponents that were soon on their own ambitious way.
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| The prolific Ken G. Hall |
Cinesound would produce seventeen feature films between 1932 and the studio's close, which was enforced by the war in 1940. All save on were commercially successful - a record not surpassed in Australia before or since its time. Ken G.Hall directed all but one of them and even then produced the one he did not helm; 1939's Come Up Smiling.
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| Movie poster for the Cinesound's swansong feature : Dad Rudd MP (1940) |
The studio despite its raging success in the Thirties was admonished by its board to make no more feature films after the war. Ken Hall was commissioned by Columbia to make Smithy in the year 1946, the story of World War I fighter pilot and aviator Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, the first man to cross the skies over the Pacific from San Francisco to Brisbane in 1928. Though it was filmed at Cinesound with Hall's old crew - the feature was completely financed by Columbia Pictures.