by Stephen Vagg
A 1937 pearl-sploitation drama by Ken G Hall
It’s possibly unfair to include Lovers and Luggers in a series on forgotten Australian movies as it was a big deal in its day – decent budget, proper cinema release, overseas success, imported American star, well known director, etc. However, that day was in 1937 and we think that it’s fair to say that the fame of Lovers and Luggers has not lingered – in part, due to the difficulty of seeing a copy. There are a few versions on Youtube, but the movie is not commercially available.
We wanted to revisit it as a companion piece to our articles on Typhoon Treasure and King of the Coral Sea. Like those (and Hound of the Deep, and Isle of Intrigue), Lovers and Luggers is an example of pearl-sploitation: films set in Australia’s exotic north, where heroic divers dig for pearls and fight baddies, sharks and decompression sickness.
It’s not hard to understand the appeal of such tales to producers, with their colourful backgrounds, and ability to be genre pieces with a distinctively Australian setting. (There were radio plays set in this world such as The Bombora by Coral mum-of-Malcolm-Turnbull Lansbury, plus Peter Yeldham’s television play East of Christmas – filmed for British TV but the script was rejected by the ABC – while movie producer Joseph Kaufman tried to make a film of Colin Simpson’s Come Away Pearler.)
Lovers and Luggers was based on a 1928 novel by “Gurney Slade”, the pen name for British author Stephe Barlett, who had worked as a pearler in Broome, so the book has an authentic background. It tells a slightly outlandish story about a concert pianist, Daubenny, who travels to “Lorne” (Broome) to find a pearl to impress the sexy Stella Raff. He has various adventures with the colourful locals including Captain Quidley, his daughter Lorna, and some villains. You can read a serialisation here.
Film rights were bought by Cinesound, the leading film production company in Australia during the 1930s. Cinesound typically made two types of movies, comedies or melodramas – the former included the Dad and Dave films and vehicles for comics such as Roy Rene, George Wallace and Cecil Kellaway, while the latter encompassed adaptations of such stage hits as The Squatter’s Daughter and The Silence of Dean Maitland.
Lovers and Luggers wasn’t a particularly well-known novel and was based around a silly idea (man chases pearl to impress woman) but one can see its attraction for Cinesound –it offered a heroic lead role, the opportunity for romance, music and action, a colourful setting and support cast, it was Australian but was action-adventure and thus might travel overseas, and gave an opportunity to use the studio’s top-notch art department and fancy new back projection equipment. That’s the formula producer-director Ken G Hall had just employed with Tall Timbers, so it made sense to tell a story in the tropics. We also think that after so many comedies and stage play adaptations, Hall (and Cinesound) was in the mood to make a real Hollywood-style adventure movie set in a racy location full of exotic sets and character actors, like China Seas.
There was a trend at the time to import third-tier Hollywood names to appear in Australian films; this would generate considerable publicity at home and possibly help overseas sales. Thus, Charles Farrell was in The Flying Doctor, Victor Jory in Rangle River and Helen Twelvetrees was in Hall’s Thoroughbred. The star of Lovers and Luggers was Lloyd Hughes who’d been a bit of a name in the silent era (he was in 1925’s The Lost World) but had been on the slide since and was presumably glad for a gig, even one on the other side of the world. Hughes wasn’t much of a movie star, and he’s probably the weakest link in the final film, but in his defence, it’s a tricky part – to move from world weary concert pianist to tough pearl diver – and Hughes does okay; he certainly doesn’t kill the movie.
Sidney Wheeler, a Briton who moved to Australia in the 1920s and stayed, made his film debut as Captain Quidley; James Raglan, another Pom working in the colonies, was the mysterious Bill Craig, while New Zealander Elaine Hamill played Stella. The rest of the cast was dominated by Cinesound’s stock company: Shirley Ann Richards, an ingenue under permanent contract to the company, was Lorna, Alec Kellaway played a drunk, Ron Whelan was a villain, Frank Harvey took the part of Hughes’ manager. Most of these actors doubled on other duties – Kellaway ran Cinesound’s acting school, Whelan was an assistant director, Harvey wrote the script and was dialogue director. (After this film, Wheeler would become part of the stock company as well.)
Harvey was Cinesound’s in-house writer and did solid work on the script for Lovers and Luggers. Top radio playwright Edward Barclay is credited with “story treatment”, so he obviously made some contribution, but the screenplay feels very “Frank Harvey” – there’s lots of theatrical epigrammatical dialogue, well defined characters, and strong sense of structure. The pace is fast, the characters are clearly sketched, the story proceeds logically – well, for the most part… There’s an opening sequence with Hughes and his manager (played by Harvey) where Hughes decides to go to Thursday Island by pointing at it on the globe, and then in the next scene Elaine Hamill/Stella asks Hughes to get a pearl… it’s a little bit too much of a coincidence that that’s where Hamill has also (spoilers) sent James Raglan – we think that scene is mostly there to ensure Harvey had a role in the film. But for the most part, it’s a really good screenplay.
What Harvey (and Hall) nailed in particular are the emotional beats – Hughes’ infatuation with Hamill, the sense of camaraderie on the island amongst the pearlers (with their songs, rituals, and boozing), the growing friendship between Hughes and Raglan, and Hughes and Wheeler, the romance between Hughes and Richards (with Hughes assuming that she wants Raglan and Richards not declaring her love until Hughes has dumped Hamill). The film has a lot of heart and this is beautifully bought to life by the cast – as mentioned, Hughes isn’t great, but the key players around him are very good, in particular Wheeler (who steals the film), Whelan, Raglan, Kellaway and Richards (delightful as always, even if at 20 she was half Hughes’ age). Richards and Wheeler genuinely seem like daughter and father, she believably falls for Hughes; Hughes has a warm friendship with Wheeler and Raglan; even Ron Whelan’s villain has our sympathy because he’s in love with a trashy girl. The finale is emotionally satisfying, with Raglan saving Hughes’ life, Hughes slipping his pearl to Raglan so Raglan can be free, and Hughes breaking it off with Hamill then realising Richards loves him and not Raglan. We also like the touches of life on Thursday Island (giving your life story on “the top step”, carousing in bars) which, from memory, come from Slade’s original novel. Campbell Copelin pops up as an upper-class English twit and is great fun (even if the copy of the film we saw seems to truncate his story).
The movie contains spectacular set design, perhaps the best of any Australian film of the 1930s. The Cinesound art department really goes to town on Lovers and Luggers – there are concert halls, London apartments, bars, nightclubs, Thursday Island streets, bungalows, pearl luggers… It is splendid work. There is also superb second unit footage shot by Frank Hurley on Thursday Island as well as scenes filmed at Botany Bay and North Sydney pool. Ken G Hall doesn’t have the reputation as a visual stylist, possibly because he didn’t use fancy tricks, but Lovers and Luggers is one of the best-looking Australian movies of its era. It was not cheap, clearly.
The film has the racial sensitivities of the time – the local drunk (Alec Kellaway) is Scottish, the villains are non-Anglo, the local dancer is “Chi Chi”, the servants and porters are Asian/Pasifika, and people are praised for being a “white man”. It also conforms to sexual norms – the seductress Hamill is “bad” and selfish, while Shirley Richards’ character is faithful and loyal. But there is some subversion – for instance, Richards walks around Thursday Island at night in men’s gear (a surprisingly common trope at the time) and goes out on boats with the other pearlers. And if the non-white characters are in a minority with little dialogue, at least there are plenty of them.
The movie came out on New Years’ Eve 1937 and was a solid hit. Ken Hall told Graham Shirley that the film’s commercial performance was a disappointment to Norman Rydge, the new head of Greater Union (which owned Cinesound) – we get the feeling that with all those expensive sets and the imported Hollywood name, Rydge might have been expecting a blockbuster. Maybe Lovers and Luggers would have been a bigger hit with a more virile star, or a more serious story – the stakes of this are very light and a murder could have cranked things up. (NB. Rydge would ultimately be a toxic influence on the Australian film industry and wind up killing Cinesound’s feature production, but that’s another issue for another article.)
Nonetheless, Lovers and Luggers sold to the UK and the USA; it screened in the latter under the title Vengeance of the Deep and based on newspaper advertisements from the time, seems to have had quite a decent run over there, certainly better than the Cinesound comedies. (The copy of the film we saw via the National Film and Sound Archive was called ‘Vengeance of the Deep” and clocks in at 91 minutes.)
Lovers and Luggers remained a favourite of Ken G Hall’s – and indeed, it’s one of his best films, full of life, good nature, and positivity. You can feel the director working at the top of his game, with an excellent cast and crew on a life-affirming story.
The author would like to thank Graham Shirley and the National Film and Sound Archive for its assistance with this piece. Unless otherwise mentioned, all opinions are the author’s.
