by Stephen Vagg
1937 fish out of water comedy
It’s generally known that a lot of famous “Australian” showbiz people originally came from New Zealand; it’s less acknowledged the number that moved from South Africa. Yet for years, our cultural landscape has been enriched by these (almost entirely white, it must be admitted) fugitives from the veldt, among them names like Elsa Chauvel (born in Melbourne but raised in South Africa), Bryce Courtenay, Jessica Marais, Tammin Sursok and Cecil Kellaway, star of It Isn’t Done.
Kellaway is probably best remembered to film fans today for scores of supporting appearances in Hollywood movies and TV shows such as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, Harvey and The Postman Always Rings Twice (where he plays Lana Turner’s husband, who – for some reason – doesn’t think that she’ll cheat on him).
In 1920s/30s Australia though, Kellaway was a huge stage star. Not a pure comedian like say George Wallace or Roy Rene, he was a predominantly comic actor who came to (theatrical) fame as the bewildered dad of hot daughters in the musical A Night Out (Kellaway started playing this in his early thirties but had one of those old faces). He went on to appear in all sorts of roles, but his speciality was doing variations on this performance – the dad-next-door, confused, henpecked, dim, meddling, sometimes gruff, stressed, fond of a joke, loyal, prone to interfering in his daughter’s love lives, decent down deep… it’s an archetype familiar from countless TV sitcoms. Kellaway was basically our 1920s/30s equivalent of (trigger warning) Bill Cosby, (trigger warning) Robert Hughes, (maybe a small trigger warning) Tim Allen, and (no trigger warning warning) Ray Romano.
By the mid-1930s, Kellaway had already made one film, Beaumont Smith’s The Hayseeds (1933), a cheerful musical rip-off of On Our Selection with Kellaway starring as a rural bewildered dad. It was a hit and might have led to more sequels had not Smith retired after making the box office flop Splendid Fellows. Kellaway was keen to make more movies and approached Australia’s leading director Ken G Hall at Cinesound Productions with an idea for a movie which Hall later claimed was basically a few sentences scribbled on a piece of paper (we believe this – unlike George Wallace and Bert Bailey, Kellaway doesn’t have many writer credits), about Kellaway being a farmer who inherits a title in England. This became It Isn’t Done.
Hall instantly grasped the commercial possibilities of this concept (which wasn’t exactly original, even then, but was clearly perfect for Kellaway) and had it turned into a script by Frank Harvey, an experienced actor-writer who had just joined Cinesound as an in-house writer/dialogue director (i.e. he would talk to the actors for Hall). Harvey was the perfect person to write It Isn’t Done – he was English, but had lived for many years in Australia, so had affection for both countries. Harvey also understood structure, something often lacking in Hall’s earliest films – the quality of the director’s movies shot up sharply after Harvey began writing them.
It Isn’t Done features Kellaway as Hubert Blaydon, a successful Australian farmer (rich enough to have a maid), who inherits a baronial estate in England. He heads to the Old Country accompanied by his wife and daughter Patricia, and they all find themselves in shenanigans – clashes with butlers and snobs, with Patricia falling for a writer Peter, who is next in line for the estate. Eventually, Blaydon gets sick of English life and gives up his claim to the estate for Peter, who marries Patricia.
It Isn’t Done is particularly interesting in its acknowledgement of the cruelties of the world and the sadness of life. The film establishes Blaydon’s father was killed in a storm when Blaydon was young (a seemingly throwaway line that adds immensely to the strength of the character), and that his son died in battle during World War One. The snobbery of Lord Denvee (the executor of the estate) is genuinely cruel, with the Blaydons being invited over to dinner by the Denvees, then shoved in the library when it’s realised they are uncouth Australians, and a promised presentation at court being withdrawn. The movie is not overly heavy but it’s not as light as the non-Kellaway comedies that Hall made.
Kellaway is splendid in a tailor-made role, the highlight being when he impersonates a koala while drunk. Shirley Ann Richards [above], who plays Patricia, is also excellent – she was a discovery through Cinesound’s talent school and turned out to be a screen natural: pretty and warm, classy without being stuck up, flirtatious without being vampy. Her scenes with Kellaway have true warmth and she manages to believably fall in love with the actor who plays Peter, British thesp John Longden (a former Hitchcock leading man who’d been in two earlier films for Hall, The Silence of Dean Maitland and Thoroughbred), even though Longden gives off a creepy vibe, and was seventeen years older than Richards and looks it. At least the film makes the character of Peter earn Patricia’s love, by giving him a job as a waiter, and getting him a book contract.
Frank Harvey wrote himself the juicy part of Lord Denvee, who is really, really mean – yes, it is moving at the end when it’s revealed that his son died during the same battle as Kellaway’s/Blaydon’s, but that doesn’t forgive him for his behaviour. Still, a strong antagonist. One of our favourite character actors, Campbell Copelin, is fun as always as a snobby Australian abroad (rebuked by Richards who says “I’m an Australian all the time”). But the film is stolen by Harvey Adams as Jarms [left], who has a touching bromance with Blaydon, accompanying the family back to Australia at the end of the movie. (The British characters in the movie – Denvee, Peter, Jarms – are the ones who take the biggest emotional journeys; Blaydon and his family all start out nice and end up nice.)
The film has definite cultural interest in its depictions of how (some) Australians saw themselves and the British. In one scene, Kellaway/Blaydon says the only Australians he’ll talk to in London are “Joe Lyons, Billy Hughes or Don Bradman” (clearly Blaydon was a big fan of Labor traitors – and with Stanley Bruce being in England, too).
Rewatching It Isn’t Done, we were surprised how few jokes there were, the level of Denvee’s nastiness, the high quality of the acting (especially Richards, Copelin, Harvey and Kellaway) and the art direction (with baronial halls, nightclubs, etc). The movie led to Kellaway being offered a contract to RKO – he took it and based himself in Hollywood for the rest of his career, although returned to Australia one more time to make Mr Chedworth Steps Out for Hall. In Hollywood, Kellaway continued to play bewildered dads of hot daughters, usually in support (Wuthering Heights, I Married a Witch), although sometimes even the lead (The Good Fellow) and occasionally even Australian (Interrupted Melody). Financially and creatively, Kellaway made the correct decision to emigrate – but there is something nice in the fact that he never had a vehicle as perfectly constructed for him as It Isn’t Done.
The author would like to thank Graham Shirley for his assistance with this piece. Unless otherwise specified, all opinions are the author’s
