by Stephen Vagg
For a long time, Australian director Charles Chauvel received far more critical plaudits/attention than Ken G Hall, his only real rival for making movies here in the 1930s and ‘40s, because Chauvel’s personal stamp and nationalism was so much more evident in his movies. Rarely did Chauvel nail his patriotic colours to the mast as much as in Heritage, a 1935 epic that he made in collaboration with his wife Elsa.
The movie came about in part due to the box office success of Cavalcade (1933), the adaptation of Noel Coward’s play about several generations of an English family, which put that family in several historical events (Boer War, Titanic, World War One, etc).
With Heritage, Chauvel was keen to do something similar in Australia: a saga that spanned from Governor Phillip’s arrival until the present day, told through the one family.
He was spurred into action in particular by the Australian government, which, in a bid to encourage the local film industry, had announced the Commonwealth Government Film Competition, which gave an award to the best Australian-made film (it was first held in 1930 – no film was considered good enough for First Prize but Fellers was awarded Second Prize).
None of Chauvel’s previous three films (Moth of Moonbi, Greenhide, In the Wake of the Bounty) had been big hits, but he managed to rustle up more than £24,000 to make Heritage, which was a lot for an Australian film at the time (Grandad Rudd cost a reported £15,000). Chauvel owed a lot of this fundraising to the support of his friend Herc McIntyre, head of Universal in Australia, a strong backer of the director.
Heritage was shot over eight months in1934 at a variety of locations, including Canungra in Queensland and Pittwater, Sydney, with studio work in Melbourne. Chauvel fancied himself as a bit of a star spotter – and with good reason, his last film had been the movie debut of Errol Flynn, and in later years, he would give crucial career breaks to actors such as Chips Rafferty, Michael Pate and Robert Tudawali. In Heritage, he used three newbies in the lead roles: Franklyn Bennett, an amateur theatre actor; Margot Rhys, a model; and Mary Maguire, a hotelier’s daughter.
The movie hit cinemas in 1935 accompanied by a lot of publicity; it wound up winning the Commonwealth Government Film Competition (The Silence of Dean Maitland came second and Clara Gibbings came third) but only doing so-so at the box office and likely lost money, prompting Chauvel to try and make something more commercial for his next effort, Uncivilised.
Heritage is one of those films you want to be better than it is because its ambition is so endearing – to make an Australian historical epic. And it has some good things – the photography by the Higgins brothers is beautiful, there’s some wonderful locations, and memorable bits, like Governor Arthur Phillip (played by Frank Harvey) having a banquet with little food and female convicts arriving off the boat. The central dramatic situation of the movie is fine – a young settler (played by Franklyn Bennett) falls for an Irish migrant (Mary Maguire) but he is promised to someone else (Margot Rhys); the Irish migrant marries someone else, and both die in an Aboriginal attack, and the young settler raises her orphaned baby… that’s solid soap.
But it’s very amateurish – Chauvel tries to fit in too much, the dialogue is clunky (like Governor Macquarie talking about a street that he wanted name after him) and much of the acting looks like bad community theatre. The biggest debit are the two leads, Franklyn Bennett and Mary Maguire. Both of them look the part – which is presumably why they were cast – but Bennett is atrocious, all stiff and awkward, and is called upon on to do too much. In fairness, he doesn’t have a great character to play and Errol Flynn was bad in his debut (Chauvel’s In the Wake of the Bounty), so maybe Bennett would’ve turned into a decent movie actor eventually (he moved to Britain and had a long career but mostly on stage). Mary Maguire is pretty and spirited but awkward; she did get the chance to improve in later movies, starting with The Flying Doctor, and eventually had a decent-ish career in Hollywood and London before marrying an aristocrat who was interned for fascism. But the leads’ inexperience, especially Bennett, makes watching Heritage a hard slog.
Margot Rhys is the third lead – the Other Woman – and she’s a bit better than the other two; Chauvel used her again on Uncivilised. Stronger value comes from support players – Frank Harvey as Governor Phillip and Joe Valli as, basically, Joe Valli.
Heritage is historically fascinating – there’s cameos from figures like William Wentworth (Victor Fitzherbert) and Lachlan Macquarie (Norman French) – but a lot of it is unpleasant. There is an Aboriginal attack on a farmhouse, shot like an Indian attack in a Western – such things did happen, occasionally, it was just a shame that this is the only real depiction of Aboriginals in the whole film. There’s a weird last act set in the 1930s, where Mary Maguire and Franklin Bennett play each other’s descendants – Maguire turns up as a funky aviatrix but Bennett tells her that her job is to follow her man, and… that’s what happens. Again, typical of films of the time but still… it would have been more of a fun movie if she’d kept flying planes.
These sort of multi-generational stories tend to work better as miniseries (eg Dirtwater Dynasty) than features, which are more effective with a focused narrative.
Chauvel would learn his lessons and crack the code on how to make a pioneering epic with Sons of Matthew. That fixed many of Heritage’s problems – better actors, a more concise narrative, stronger narrative drive, more limited time period.
You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and the omelette that is Sons of Matthew is the result of Heritage’s broken eggs.
