by Stephen Vagg
In the entire history of Australian cinema, no director or producer has ever displayed such a consistent knack of making crowd-pleasing features as Ken G Hall. His talents reached an apogee with 1946’s Smithy, which was his most expensive and polished movie to date, a smooth piece of entertainment that was widely seen in Australia and helped launch a movie star. Smithy was made by Hall at the peak of his powers, telling a personal story within the confines of broad entertainment. It was also the last feature that he ever made, although he continued to try to make more for the next decade. So, while Smithy is a film to be treasured, admired and enjoyed, it’s a little sad watching it – which does kind of mirror the story that it’s telling on screen.
As discussed in our piece on Dad Rudd MP, Cinesound – Hall’s studio – ceased making features shortly after World War Two broke out, although Hall kept his directorial muscles sharp by turning out movies for the wartime Department of Information, particularly dramatised shorts (such as 100,000 Cobbers and South West Pacific) and documentaries (such as Jungle Patrol).
Towards the end of the war, Hall was approached by Nick Pery, managing director of Columbia in Australia, who suggested that the filmmaker direct a feature for Columbia Studios. The idea was to use funds “frozen” in Australia by currency regulations i.e. money earned in Australia on Columbia’s movies that the Australian government refused to be returned to America but could be spent by Columbia within Australia (this was a common economic measure during and immediately after the war to help countries get their economies back on track). Thus, the movie, while made entirely with Australian talent, would be entirely financed by an American studio.
Pery wanted to make a movie that appealed to both Australian and American audiences, so it was decided to make a biopic about an internationally famous Australian. Apparently, various people were considered including Ned Kelly, Nellie Melba and Don Bradman, but these were rejected for various reasons (too bushranger-y, too expensive, too unknown in America, etc). Incidentally, back in 1939 Hall had wanted to star Marjorie Lawrence, an internationally successful Australian opera singer, in a biopic about Melba but the advent of war prevented that from happening – then, during the war, Lawrence got polio, lost the ability to walk, and made a comeback… so her life became really interesting dramatically and was turned into a successful movie from MGM called Interrupted Melody (1955); in contrast, no one liked the film eventually made of Melba’s not-that-compelling-when-you-really-get-into-it life, Melba (1953). Sidebar: you know who might’ve been a good subject for Hall and Pery to dramatise, who we don’t think was even discussed? Swimming/film star Annette Kellerman, whose life was the source for the entertaining and popular MGM musical Million Dollar Mermaid (1953) with Esther Williams. In fairness, making that would probably have been too expensive for something shot in 1945 Australia, requiring a lot of water tanks. Anyway, we’re really getting off track here… the person that was settled on by Ken Hall and Nick Pery was aviator Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, aka Smithy.
Smithy isn’t super famous these days, at least we don’t think so, but in the 1940s, he was one of the best-known Australians in the world, famed for his long-distance aviation feats in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly making the first-ever trans-Pacific flight from Australia to mainland USA. A bunch of other Aussie flyers were doing this around the same time, people like Bert Hinkler, but Smithy was the most high profile, forever in the news for breaking flying records and crashing and almost crashing and trying to start his own airline (his involvement in fascist organisations like the New Guard was less publicised). Smithy was a bit of a PR seeker in his day, making cameos in movies like Splendid Fellows (1934) and appearing in documentaries like The Old Bus (1933). The 1934 film Secret of the Skies was partly inspired by an incident when the Southern Cloud, one of the planes from Smithy’s airline, disappeared with all on board in 1931. Smithy kept doing long distance flights to drum up publicity for his airline – it was during one such flight, in 1935, that he died (well, disappeared) over the Bay of Bengal.
Ken G. Hall isn’t known as a personal filmmaker but the Kingsford Smith story clearly had huge resonance for him – the story of a man who enters a glamorous, dangerous industry, and achieves a lot of success and acclaim, but can never quite succeed in establishing a workable long-term business model in said industry, who is constantly scrounging for finance, going around with a cap in hand to government officials and financiers for more money, being endlessly criticised by know-it-alls, and who is aware of the importance of publicity and a strong team. This personal resonance resulted in a remarkably adult and downbeat movie, easily Hall’s most mature work in his career.
Hall started off looking for screenwriters (his regular writer through the late 1930s, Frank Harvey, was under contract to ABC radio and presumably too busy). He approached various writers for a take on the material, including the country’s leading film critics Kenneth Slessor and Josephine O’Neill – their treatments weren’t any good, which doesn’t surprise us. The bulk of the work on the final script for Smithy wound up being done by Hall himself (under a pseudonym), and two truly excellent Australian writers: Max Afford, one of the leading radio playwrights in the country (who we wrote about here), and Alec Coppel, a Melbourne boy who established himself as a playwright and screenwriter in London in the late 1930s, then returned to Australia during the war, and who later co-wrote Vertigo (1958) for Alfred Hitchcock and was nominated for an Oscar for The Captain’s Paradise (1953). Smithy would be Afford’s sole film credit, and Coppel’s only Australian movie credit.
The script for Smithy starts in World War One, with Smithy being decorated for valour, and goes up until the pilot’s death in 1935 (aside from a brief prologue set during World War Two). It broadly sticks to the facts of the pilot’s life, although there was the inevitable condensing and fictionalisation – for instance, a whole character, an American girl called Kay, was created to give the movie a key female character in its first half, before Smithy meets his wife (in real life, the latter was his second wife; Smithy’s first wife is tactfully omitted from the film altogether).
The movie’s tone is closer to the let’s-try-to-make-this-accurate semi-documentary approach of British biopics such as, say, Scott of the Antarctic (1948), versus the who-cared-what-really-happened-this-is-a-movie method of Hollywood, like Interrupted Melody and Million Dollar Mermaid. Having said that, there are plenty of Hollywood tropes in Smithy, such as characters saying things like “I tell you Smithy, it can’t be done”, and foreshadowing dialogue about how Smithy won’t be appreciated in his life and the threat of Japan.
For the modern viewer, Smithy is occasionally hard to follow because it assumes knowledge from the audience about certain things which aren’t explained – such as the deaths of Kingsford-Smith’s co-pilot, Charles Ulm in a 1934 crash, and of Anderson and Hitchcock, the two pilots who died in 1929 searching for Smithy when the latter crashed in the desert. These things would have been widely known by Australian audiences at the time, but that is not the case today.
A more serious dramatic problem for Smithy is that while flying long distances across the ocean in the 1920s and 1930s was highly dangerous and involved enormous skill and bravery, when you watch it on screen, it’s basically someone sitting in a cockpit. It’s hard to make that too interesting. Smithy is strongest in the second half when it gets more serious and downbeat and Smithy is basically waiting to die. As mentioned, Hall clearly related to his struggles, and this whole section is very moving.
The title role was played Ron Randell, picked by Hall and Columbia over Peter Finch, even though by that stage Finch was acknowledged as the best actor in the country; while Randell never became the star Finch did, we think it was the right decision – Randell had more dash, better looks, more obvious star charisma. He’s very bright and gives an excellent performance – he was never as good in his American films (except maybe King of Kings); moodiness suited him, as did an Australian accent. The female lead, Mrs Smithy, was well played by Muriel Steinbeck who’d just been with Randell and Finch in A Son is Born. Incidentally, Steinbeck later claimed Hall wanted to cast comic Dick Bentley as Smithy, which is a weird idea, but who knows, maybe it could’ve worked.
Ron Randell and Steinbeck have a great meet cute when he gives her his autograph when she thinks he’s a messenger boy. Other stuff is less fun like Smith sexually harassing a nurse at the beginning asking for a back rub and some casual/formal racism of the time: one character talking about Japanese as apes, and Smithy meeting a black porter in America and making a joke about Australians being cannibals.
Two former co-pilots of Kingsford Smith, P.G. Taylor and Harry Purvis, played themselves, as did former Prime Minister Billy Hughes [left, with Ken G. Hall]. Charles Ulm was played (very well) by John Tate and while Keith Anderson was played by John Fleeting (an old Cinesound leading man from films like Come Up Smiling). Charles Tingwell has a few lines at the beginning as an air traffic controller. Alec Kellaway, Hall’s favourite character actor from the Cinesound days, played Smithy’s main American backer, Allan Hancock. The fictitious Kay is played by Joy Nichols; there’s a weird bit where Alec Kellaway asks her “does he know?” Know what? That she loves him? That she’s engaged? It’s confusing.
Smithy was a big hit in Australia, and received a release in the US, although the latter version had a much shorter running time as well as a new title, Pacific Adventure. Despite/because-of this, the film performed disappointingly in America and Columbia decided not to invest in any more Australian pictures. The studio did offer Randell a long term contract, which started off well (leads in “B”s like Bulldog Drummond at Bay and supports in “A”s like It Had to Be You) but Columbia’s enthusiasm for the actor soon cooled and he never became the star that his performance in Smithy indicated that he might be.
After Smithy, Hall tried to make more features, coming close to getting money for his version of Robbery Under Arms (with Ron Randell pencilled in to play the lead at one stage), but, for a variety of reasons, he could never get the funds. He kept busy churning out newsreels for Cinesound, then accepted an offer to manage Channel Nine for Frank Packer, the antisemitic nepo baby who had been gifted commercial television licences by the Menzies government in exchange for sympathetic press coverage in his newspapers. Packer was a tremendous opponent of Australian television drama, regularly lobbying against a quota; Hall fell in line with his boss’s dictates like a good company man: under his watch (1956-66), Channel Nine Sydney made not a single hour of prime time Australian drama – a period that Hall generally gave scant mention to in his memoirs and various career interviews, preferring instead to focus on his significant achievements at Cinesound, and complaints about new Australian films. Hall certainly had a right to an opinion, and his skills could definitely have been better utilised in the 1970s and 1980s on various film and television boards as opposed to the tired old ex-ABC hands who seemed to dominate them.
For years, it seemed critics would emphasise the works of Charles Chauvel over Ken G. Hall, in part because Chauvel’s personal stamp was so much more obvious. But when you watch Hall’s oeuvre, it’s not only more consistent, it’s full of personal touches too – and few of them were more personal than Smithy. Many final films of great directors are depressing affairs because of their poor quality in contrast with what came before, eg Family Plot (Hitchcock), Rio Lobo (Howard Hawks), The Osterman Weekend (Sam Peckinpah), The Human Factor (Otto Preminger), Countess from Hong Kong (Chaplin), Fever Pitch (Richard Brooks), Pocketful of Miracles (Frank Capra), Buddy Buddy (Billy Wilder), A Matter of Time (Vincente Minelli) (Yes we know there are apologists for all these movies; there are apologists for everything). However, in some cases, a director’s final film ranks among their greatest work and this is definitely the case with Ken G Hall and Smithy.
The author would like to thank Graham Shirley for his assistance with this article. Unless otherwise specified all opinions are those of the author.
