by Stephen Vagg
In the history of early Australian film making, Beaumont Smith occupies an honoured if slightly shabby place as one of the most prolific producers and directors of the silent era. Smith was a journalist turned press agent who moved into producing stage productions, his acts including a touring troupe of little people billed as “Tiny Town”, and adaptations of the stories of Henry Lawson.
In 1917, Smith decided to enter the movie industry by making Our Friends the Hayseeds, a comedy about a yokel family which shamelessly ripped off the stage adaptation of Steele Rudd’s On Our Selection stories (Smith wrote an early draft of this play adaptation).
Our Friends the Hayseeds – which was shot outside Adelaide and starred Roy Redgrave (dad of actor Michael and grandad of actresses Vanessa and Lynn) – was a success and launched Smith’s filmmaking career; over the next decade, he made sixteen more movies, five of which were Hayseeds sequels.
Smith operated fast, cheap and quickly (he was sometimes known as “One Take Beau” or “That’ll Do Beau”), always aiming to exploit some gap in the market – for instance, he would recut some of his Hayseeds movies to insert titles and scenes specific to a particular city to make it more appealing to that city (eg Townies and Hayseeds had separate Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide versions, each featuring scenes and jokes relating to that specific city). He was up for making any movie that might turn a buck: adaptations of Banjo Patterson (The Man from Snowy River) and Henry Lawson (While the Bill Boils, Joe), starring vehicles for touring comedians Claude Dampier (Hullo Marmaduke, The Adventures of Algy) and Barry Lupino (Barry Butts In), interracial romance (The Betrayal), anti-German, anti-Chinese melodrama (Satan in Sydney), a starring vehicle for a racehorse (Desert Gold), a bushranger melodrama (The Gentleman Bushranger), vehicles for Arthur Tauchert (The Digger Earl, Joe). Smith gave some early lead roles to Lotus Thompson, a beautiful starlet who moved to Hollywood and struggled to find work until she received some publicity for dousing her legs with acid, a story that was later revealed to be made up.
In 1925, Smith retired from filmmaking to manage theatres for JC Williamson, the theatrical management who dominated commercial theatre in Australia and New Zealand. However, the success of the sound version of On Our Selection in 1932 inspired Smith to make a movie comeback and he blew the dust off his Hayseeds IP and made The Hayseeds (the seventh in the franchise and the first one with sound).
Smith made the film in conjunction with JC Wiliamson’s film branch JC Williamson Picture Productions, taking several of the cast from a JC Williamson stage musical in Sydney called Music in the Air, the most notable of which was Cecil Kellaway, a hugely talented South African-Australian comic actor who carved out a niche playing befuddled dads who we’ve discussed in pieces on It Isn’t Done and Mr Chedworth Steps Out.
Beaumont Smith’s sound version of The Hayseeds shamelessly rips off Hall’s version of On Our Selection – the characterisation of Dad and Joe Hayseed are just like Dad and Dave Rudd, with Kellaway making a speech about drought and banks just like Bert Bailey did, and the scene where Tal Ordell’s dumb Joe Hayseed woos an equally dim Pansy is very close to one in On Our Selection with Fred MacDonald’s Dave Rudd (Pansy was played by Molly Raynor who was also in Selection). Just like On Our Selection, there is a “straight” mystery romance subplot between an attractive female juvenile and a man unjustly accused of a crime.
We love Cecil Kellaway, but to be honest, he feels a little miscast doing an imitation of Bert Bailey here – Kellaway always gave off a kindly, gentle vibe, and the big “battler” speech he gives badly lacks Bailey’s fire; Kellaway would be far more comfortably cast as a farmer in It Isn’t Done. It doesn’t help that he’s clearly younger (by ten years) than Ordell, who plays his son (indeed, Ordell played Dad Hayseed for a few of the silent Hayseed films). Still, both actors are better than the romantic juveniles who are terribly wet.
One area where The Hayseeds differs from On Our Selection, is that while the latter cross-pollinated Steele Rudd’s original stories with stage melodrama (the murder subplot), The Hayseeds cross-pollinates it with JC Williamsons’ stage musicals: there’s these dancing hikers who come through the bush, and a plot about a girl getting lost in the bush who comes across a mystery man strumming a guitar who turns out to be the long lost nephew of a British Lord suspected of theft. This story is resolved quickly and lazily – it turns out that the mystery English man took the blame for theft for his relative who is really guilty; that relative dies off screen and confesses, clearing his name. And Dad Hayseed gets out of financial trouble by winning the lottery, which feels like cheating.
Still, we’ve got to admit that we find The Hayseeds kind of fun and endearingly odd. All the talk about drought and banks and being broke, while manufactured, have a basis of truth and would’ve meant a lot to depression era audiences; there are genuinely funny moments such as Kellaway and Ordell dressing up as Ned Kelly to help a friend; the songs are charmingly weird; the romantic scenes are entertainingly campy; the Busby Berkley-style number at the end is quite good; the sets and locations are pretty; there’s a fun bit where the Hayseeds visit Sydney; and the whole movie reeks of a genuine love of Australia which is engaging.
Legendary silent era director Raymond Longford (whose credits include two silent era Dad Rudd films, both of which starred Tal Ordell) worked on the movie as “associate director” – from what we’ve been able to gather, he started out being the director, but struggled with the technical issues of making a sound picture which made the thrifty Smith impatient, so Smith took over as director. It seems, however, that Longford stayed on the film in some capacity.
The film inspired a pearl clutching review in The Bulletin which worried that this film and On Our Selection are “likely to create a disastrous impression of Australians in Britain and the U.S.A.”
The Hayseeds movie did quite well at the box office, but Smith’s next film, Splendid Fellows (1934) flopped, and Smith retired again. Precious little of his oeuvre survives today but you can see a copy of all of The Hayseeds here.
The author would like to thank Graham Shirley for his assistance with this article. Unless otherwise specified all opinions are those of the author.
