By Geoff Stanton
When the cinders of The Great Depression were stirred by a small Sydney film crew, few imagined that the story of a struggling barmaid would roar around the world as a global hit. But the intimate portrait of relentless desperation, with its hovels, hungry miles and brawling barrooms, represented an exquisite high for Australian cinema. The film’s cacophonous six o’clock swill scenes – coloured by ancient extras who thought they were still storming the bar – certainly don’t hurt either. Yet for a time, it must have seemed to producer Anthony Buckley and director Donald Crombie that they had inadvertently written themselves into the script. Not only were they striving to meet the ambitious challenges of retreading the lead character Caddie’s plight, but the opposition that they faced in financing a film about a woman was nothing short of staggering.
THE HUNGRY MILE
“I’ve been told that things will never work so many times that I ignore it now,” muses veteran producer and film editor Anthony Buckley (the man behind Bliss, The Harp In The South and Oyster Farmer, amongst others) as he reflects on the reception that he received when he tried to sell the idea of “a film about a woman” to some of cinema’s major players in 1974. “I’m serious about that. If people say that it will never work, it means that you’ve got a hit on your hands. When it came to Caddie, we were all very young and naïve. I wondered what on earth I’d walked into, because I didn’t know that there was such prejudice. It smacked of The Depression, but it was only yesterday!”
It was by pure chance that the young Anthony Buckley discovered the barmaid’s story that would form the basis of Caddie. Buckley was on his way home from an exhausting day editing a particularly brutal scene for Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 classic Wake In Fright when he came across the paperback. “I was coming home from cutting the kangaroo hunt, and it was pretty exhausting,” Buckley explains. “The newsagent was about to close, so I went and got the Saturday papers. I noticed Caddie, A Sydney Barmaid, An Autobiography Written By Herself. I was tired, so I went to bed and took the book with me. At 4:00am, I finally turned the light off and went to sleep. I decided then and there that it would make a very good film.”
The Depression-era story was indeed gripping. Following a marriage breakdown, the elegant Caddie and her two young children are forced to leave their respectable home and brave the storms of the street, spilling with queues of the desperate, the jobless, the con men, the petty crims, and many others whose only solace was found in the bars and beer-houses. It was also here that a meagre source of income for women could also be found. Without any means of financial support or welfare, and moving between seedy bedsits and housing rooms with two young children, Caddie finds herself working a string of beer taps while the men clamber, vomit and even piss at the bar rather than miss their last drink, with all taps shut off at 6:00pm.
It remains a powerful tale, but while the story centres upon The Depression, the vivid characters ensure that the turn of events never feels distant. While it was a sign of the times that a woman would be driven through such grim straits, it still feels unnervingly close to the realms of easy possibility today. “What leapt out at me was that it was about a woman,” says Buckley. “I was cutting a film [Wake In Fright] that was so blokey that it was frightening. It was about time that we did a film about women…and here was a book about a woman.” Tony Buckley couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been made into a film already. He was, perhaps, about to find out why. In his candidly insightful autobiography Behind A Velvet Light Trap, Buckley recalls the popular refrain that he was to hear: “You wanna make a film about a woman?!” “So exclaimed Michael Tarrant,” recalls Buckley, “the then head of Columbia Pictures in Australia. I’d invited Columbia to invest in Caddie and to distribute it worldwide.”
Undaunted, the budding producer also tried the unconventional avenue of approaching a bank to back the venture. “You wanna make a film about a woman?” rang the response. “The gentleman behind the desk actually thought that I was having him on,” says Buckley. “He checked his calendar to see if it was April Fool’s Day. Christ, I was naive. You’d never ask a bank for money for a film. They really think that you’re a basket case.” The head of Greater Union also told him that it was the most depressing script that he’d ever read.
Meanwhile, Buckley corralled the talents of director Donald Crombie and screenwriter Joan Long (also known for her later producing work on Puberty Blues and Emerald City). “I was working at Film Australia as a director,” says Crombie. “Tony was the editor. He’d just arrived at Film Australia, and it was the first time that I’d met him. He was impressed with the way that I used extras. I could make twenty people look like 100. He’d worked with me on a dramatised doco, and then offered me Caddie. A year or so passed – as it always does – and we eventually got together on the film.”
The perseverance of the three was beginning to pay off. Following a belated funding refusal from The Australian Film Development Corporation, Long suggested applying to The International Women’s Year Committee for investment. They received an investment of $50,000. Following this, Roadshow also confirmed a backing of $25,000. “So our journey began,” recalls Buckley.
SHORT FOR CADILLAC
“Caddie,” says Jack Thompson’s bounder, as he leans on the bar and eyes the pretty brunette pulling the taps. “That’s not my name,” the woman says. “You’ve got a lot in common, you and my Cadillac,” rejoins Thompson. “Beauty and class. So I’m calling you Caddie.” The actual identity of “Caddie” still remains shrouded in mystery. There is no doubt, however, that actress Helen Morse was an inspired choice to bring the character to the screen. Morse’s stylish grace set her at odds from the rougher grain of her surroundings, while lending the character a dignity and vulnerability as she struggles to keep her head above disaster. As a rising starlet, Morse was herself on the verge of discovery. Fresh from a role in Sandy Harbutt’s bikie flick Stone, she would become a big name in Picnic At Hanging Rock. She was also the first woman to audition for the title role in Caddie. “Donald and I looked at each other and we said, ‘She’s Caddie!’” recalls Buckley. “We both realised that this couldn’t possibly be. Over forty actresses were auditioned, but the presence of Helen continued to haunt us both.”
“In that era, the filmed auditions were speed developed at a place called Colour Film,” says Crombie. “The lab supervisor watched the rushes. He saw them mute, and he said, ‘It’s got to be Helen Morse; she’s just got so much class.’ Tony and I looked at each other and thought, ‘That’s it.’ The whole point of Caddie was that she had class, even when she was at the most down and out point in her life. If Bill had spotted that without hearing any dialogue, then we knew that this was the girl. That was the clincher. She was a wonderful actress, and she was great to work with.”
“It was the story that drew me in,” attests Helen Morse. “It was the story of an ordinary woman of extraordinary character, who fought hardship and prejudice to make a life for herself and her children, and who documented the social history of such women during The Depression. She wrote about the working conditions in the bars, the grotty rooming houses, and the colourful parade of SP bookies, petty crims, barmaids and friends.”
It was a world whose legacy still existed in certain pockets of 1975 Sydney. “My preparation involved a lot of field research,” remarks Helen Morse. “I worked for a while as a barmaid at a hotel in The Rocks, and I talked to two retired barmaids whose working lives had been similar to Caddie’s. They were very helpful with details about the daily routine in the pubs of the time – things like how to pour a beer with just the right amount of ‘collar’ on it, and how to handle the barflies! The challenge of any role for an actor is, essentially, to understand what drives the person that you are portraying. We all felt the need to do justice to this ‘true story’, but interestingly, Caddie herself, in writing the book, re-created her own life in a literary form and reinvented herself as a character.”
The main challenge for screenwriter Joan Long was in deciding what to drop from the story. The pages of the book were so full of tragedy and small triumph that piecing together the complexities of Caddie’s life seemed a daunting task. “It was a long haul for Joan to bring the script down to what we all thought was the appropriate length,” says Buckley.
“Once I’d been cast, I had meetings with Joan Long, who very generously invited me to contribute to the script,” says Morse. “I really loved the collaborative nature of the whole production. Caddie’s daughter was very supportive of the film, and shared many memories of her mother with me. A major change was the cutting, for budget reasons, of a sequence of scenes from Caddie’s girlhood. She grew up in a railway camp in Penrith where her alcoholic father worked. Joan and I argued passionately for their inclusion, but the budget couldn’t stretch.”
Says Anthony Buckley: “Joan was rewriting on Sundays when Errol Sullivan, our unit manager [who went on to successfully executive produce Blue Heelers and Water Rats], came up and said, ‘Tony, how are you going to be able to film all this in six weeks?’ So for the first three weekends, poor Joan had to cut scenes. We were professional filmmakers, but we didn’t have a clue what we were doing making a feature film. There hadn’t been a feature film industry here for years! It was the blind leading the blind. Joan had a rough time adapting it. There were three dreadful weekends for her, but after that, the last three weeks were a breeze. It all held together.”
In portraying the colourful characters that Caddie meets, a raft of other notable players also stepped into the fray. Jack Thompson is well suited to the role of Ted, the stylish, beer drinking chancer who gives Caddie her name and acquaints her with the outside world. Jacki Weaver and Melissa Jaffer also bring an earthiness as the barmaids who befriend Caddie. One particularly moving moment of the film occurs when Caddie is comforting Weaver, who waits for a backyard abortion to take effect. “The women came together very nicely,” says Buckley. “Casting is the most important part of the tapestry of a film. If you get the casting right, you’re halfway there. It goes right down to the bit parts, such as Drew Forsythe and Ron Blanchard as the Rabbitohs.” Forsythe and Blanchard are superb as the roaming Rabbitohs (so called because they would trawl the streets hawking skinned rabbits for two and sixpence) who later come to Caddie’s aid.
Then, of course, there was the strikingly mustached Greek heartthrob Takis Emmanuel, as Caddie’s unlikely love interest. The casting of Takis inevitably brought an enigmatic quality that complements Caddie brilliantly. “I knew and admired Takis’ work from wonderful productions such as Zorba The Greek,” says Morse. “I was devoted to the films of Costa-Gavras and the music of Theororakis and Maria Farandouri, so we related very well. He was perfect for the role. He brought that intense ‘otherness’ into the mix.”
The “otherness” extended to Emmanuel’s acting methods. “In Europe – at least certainly in the industry that he’d worked in – they’d never bothered with recording useable sound,” explains Crombie. “They only record a guide track, and they do the rest after. He couldn’t understand why we were so emphatic on getting location sound. Because, again, we were so inexperienced, we didn’t really trust synching. Helen hated the idea of post-synching. She couldn’t even imagine that she could possibly recreate her performance in the sound booth. So Takis and the sound recordist would have these terrible blues. The sound recordist would say, ‘I can’t hear you, Takis’, and this was deliberate from Takis. He used to whisper his lines and force us to post-synch him, which is what happened. Every scene with him is post-synched. Then Helen had to do this as well.”
Says Helen Morse: “The sound crew were challenged, as Takis was used to post-synching. It’s hard, because you never feel as if you’ve achieved the same level of reality, but it is a necessary skill in film.”
LIFE’S A BUGGER
One aspect of the story that was definitely not post-synched were the vivid six o’clock swill sessions – so called because the bars at the time would close at six, and a desperate tide of humanity would violently lurch towards the counter to beat the bell and get their last in. The pub scenes were shot in the crumbling inner-city Cinesound studios, and filled with extras picked from a nearby home. The old studios hosted a vivacious reassembly of the past. “Extras are like art direction,” begins Crombie. “There’s a certain sort of face. I used to call it the ‘Aussie wheat farmer’ sort of face. We deliberately went out to find what I call ‘period faces.’ Even today, I sometimes sit on a train, and I think, ‘You’ve got a period face. You look like an old Aussie from the thirties.’”
“The ‘six o’clock swill’ scene was one of those moments during the shoot when life and art were indivisible,” says Helen Morse. “Don and Tony had managed to get fantastic support from Actor’s Equity for the casting of ‘actuals’ as well as extras for the bar scenes. This is why the scenes are so authentic – and there was quite a lot of improvising! One old gentleman thought that he was in a real pub and kept ordering more beers!”
Says Donald Crombie: “A lot of those old chaps were very confused. They couldn’t work out why Jacki Weaver and Helen Morse wouldn’t serve them. The golden rule on film sets is that you never have alcohol there. We actually relaxed that with those old guys to keep them happy. We used to give them a real beer, and we turned a blind eye to the golden rule. They’d finish their glass and they’d be saying, ‘Excuse me, miss. Excuse me, miss.’ The actress would have to ignore them. We used to get a lot of old vaudevillian actors, who had been around for years, and a lot of those old chaps had experienced the six o’clock swill as young men. They knew what to do.”
Behind A Velvet Light Trap relates some of Crombie’s on-set diaries from the time, and in particular the practice of the art department filling the bar with smoke: “The art department’s Graham ‘Grace’ Walker went around their legs with film cans containing burning incense. ‘What are you doing, son?’ asked one old timer. ‘Making smoke,’ replied Grace. ‘What for?’ asked the ancient. ‘The film,’ said Grace. ‘What bloody film?’ It was probably the same gentleman who pushed the bar door marked ‘Gentlemen’ open, only to find sound recordist Des Bone crouched over his recording machine, and then struggled through the darkness of the set to find a length of picket fence that he anointed.”
Meanwhile, outside the studio, transforming Sydney into the past of forty years prior was a hell of a lot easier than it would be today. “You couldn’t do it now,” says Crombie. “There were two particular areas that had been owned by The Anglican Church, and they were terrible landlords. They never did up their properties. So basically, you had all these places that hadn’t changed from the thirties. You could almost just set up the camera and shoot. There were, however, things that we had to watch out for. Back in that era, everything was painted a colour they called ‘stone’, so we just made sure that we had the buildings in the right colours. Most of those old church properties hadn’t been painted for donkey’s years. It worked quite well, and we had tricks up our sleeves too. We had a lot of picket fencing. We’d just stick that up if the fencing wasn’t right, and that made it look good and period. You couldn’t make Caddie in Sydney today.”
Says Anthony Buckley: “We only had to put a metallic tape on the road and you had tram lines. We cheated like mad. You’ll hear the sound of trams in the film, but in most cases, you’ll never see them. Those we did film were out at the tramway museum. I wouldn’t like to set up a period film like Caddie in Sydney now…it would be a nightmare.”
Says Helen Morse: “The art department did an incredible job working very long hours on a small budget. They were aided by the fact that in Sydney in 1975 many of the locations had not changed since the thirties. Judith Dorsman worked miracles in her costume designs. There was a wonderful attention to detail from everyone. The gaffer, Tony Tegg, used an old lamp with its original filament to light one scene.”
Says Donald Crombie: “One of the great tragedies is that once the film is over, all this stuff gets sold or given away because there’s no central repository. It would have been wonderful to have had it stored somewhere, like the Chinese Government film studios, where you have a giant warehouse where all the props are kept, or one of the American studios. This was a great tragedy, particularly if you go on to make another period film. When we did The Irishman, we had to start again! I remember thinking, ‘My god, I’ve got to find more beer glasses from circa 1920!’”
THE BARMAID’S LEGACY
“My overriding memory of making Caddie is of the ‘grace under pressure’ of the entire production,” says Helen Morse. “It was a truly collaborative and intensely creative experience. We were flying by the seat of our pants, and the daring of being ‘in the moment.’ It was exhilarating, and I loved it. I was given the clapper board at the end of the shoot. I cherish it and only wish that Caddie herself could have seen our tribute to her remarkable story.”
Many others, however, did see the film, including Caddie’s daughter, who is portrayed in the film as a young girl. “Caddie’s daughter was on the set,” says Crombie. “She was quite amazed, and was watching this all. She really loved the film.” Caddie opened to glowing reviews, both here and overseas. In Sydney, it ran for 54 weeks. “It grossed over 2.5 million dollars on ten screens, when the ticket price was only $2.50,” says Buckley. “Today, any distributor in Australia celebrates if a film grosses over 2 million. We were also at Cannes to screen it, and we were also invited to The San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain, which was eventful.”
Helen Morse elaborates on the Spanish jaunt. “I was having a cup of coffee at Madrid Airport, waiting to board a flight to San Sebastian, when a group of Guardia Civil marched past,” she says. “They turned out to be on my flight. We arrived at San Sebastian to discover that the whole city was locked down, under curfew, owing to demonstrations by The Basque Separatists, which had resulted in the shooting death of a seventeen-year-old youth by the military. The atmosphere was volatile. None of us knew if the festival would happen. Don and his wife and friends were travelling by car across the Spanish border, and they’d been pounced on by the military. They were lined up against a wall and questioned rather aggressively. There was a massive funeral procession the next day. The tragedy put the festival in perspective. Life and the festival went on, and we met many filmmakers, enjoyed the beauty of the city, and Caddie received great accolades. Perhaps the struggle of that ordinary woman struck a chord.” Morse also unanimously received the festival’s Best Actress Award.
“We were also then invited to open The San Francisco Film Festival,” reminisces Buckley. “That was a good one to get into. I met Tennessee Williams too, who came to the screening. I was a bit worried that we might have killed him though. The AFC used to send dozens of oysters whenever there was a big Australian film at a festival, and Tennessee Williams loved oysters. He was whacking into them. He would have had at least a couple of dozen. I was thinking to myself, ‘I wonder how many days they’ve been in the Hawkesbury, and then it’s another day to the airport, and then another couple of days in transit. I hope that we’re not going to be responsible for the death of the world’s greatest playwright.’” Tennessee Williams survived until 1983.
Helen Morse fondly summarises the film’s journey. “I learned so much about filmmaking,” she says. “I gained invaluable experience as an actor, and learned many life lessons from that courageous woman. The film’s reception in Australia, where it ran for a year, and the international praise that it received, led to my being signed to a London agent and featuring in Michael Apted’s Agatha with Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman.”
Caddie, meanwhile, continues to thrive. It has been suggested that Caddie fits a triumvirate of seventies films that deal with women, sitting alongside Bruce Beresford’s The Getting Of Wisdom (1970) and Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979). Caddie, however, stands as a film that also intimately depicts a working class desperation heightened to a nadir during the turbulent years between the World Wars. It is thanks to the dedicated team that Caddie’s immaculate performances continue to jostle shoulder-to-shoulder with the ghosting crowds and middling punters of a time long gone, carrying their story of courage and humanity in a film that continues to resonate.
Caddie is available now on DVD or to stream. Many thanks to Anthony Buckley, Donald Crombie and Helen Morse for their invaluable assistance with this story.
