In the 1950's films were being made in Australia, but all of the few successes - and some of the failures were actually American or British films that were made on location. Some where star-studded extravaganzas featuring noted overseas stars. The talents of Peter Lawford and Maureen O'Hara and of director Lewis Milestone were invested by 20th Century-Fox in the costly Kangaroo (1952) which was an abject failure; Milestone seemed completely adrift and ill at ease in the Australian outback, on the other hand, the brilliant Fred Zimmerman went into a similar territory in 1960 and directed the very successful The Sundowners with Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr as an Australian sheepherder and his wife, replete with 'authentic' - as against the commonly exaggerated broad accents.
Among the few other successes of that seemingly endless drought were Anthony Kimmins' two films about a boy's adventures, Smiley (1956) and Smiley Gets a Gun (1958); Ealing's engaging The Shiralee (1957) which starred Peter Finch as a jolly swagman on the road with daughter. Stanley Kramer's apocalyptic On the Beach (1960) featuring Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire and Ava Gardner as temporary survivors in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, and Hecht-Hill-Lancaster's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1960) with John Mills and Ernest Borgnine as Queensland cane-cutters on vacation being put through the ringer with their respective girlfriends, played to perfection by Angela Lansbury and Anne Baxter. 1968's Age of Consent, the love-story of a vain roue and a young girl, with James Mason and Helen Mirren.
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| Lobby Card for the antipodean western The Sundowners (1960) |
After there were twenty tears of little real effort and no success, Australian feature-film production was apparently obsolete or at best on it's last legs as the Sixties drew to a close. Something really had to be done - and it was - in the form of a life-giving injection of gold from the public purse - and with the coming of the Seventies, the great revival of Australian cinema emerged.