by Stephen Vagg
A little-known 1938 adventure movie.
Typhoon Treasure has always occupied an odd sort of niche in amongst Australian films of the 1930s. It wasn’t a slick Ken G Hall production for Cinesound, or a stagey Frank Thring piece, or one of Charles Chauvel’s erratic epics, or a mid-Pacific international picture like Rangle River, White Death or The Flying Doctor, or the final sound films of a silent era giant like Raymond Longford or Beaumont Smith, or some barely watchable cheapie like the efforts of Rupert Kathner or A.R. Harwood (and by the way, congratulations if you recognise any of those names, and hello, fellow film nerd).
Typhoon Treasure is just a tidy, unpretentious adventure melodrama, which was executed with relative competence, had a bit of a run in cinemas (including the UK and USA), then faded from view. There were dramas associated with its making – one very serious – and it’s not a masterpiece, far from it, but we’ve always had a soft spot for the film.
Typhoon Treasure was the first dramatic feature from Noel Monkman (1896–1969), who was perhaps the most successful cellist-turned-documentarian-cinemicographer-photomicographer-microscope-expert in history. Like many key players in the Oz film industry, Monkman was a Kiwi, with a childhood fascination for microscopes and photography. His day job was as a cellist, and he played in theatre orchestras for organisations such as JC Williamsons while dabbling in filmmaking on the side. Eventually, “on the side” became his real gig – nature documentaries, particularly underwater on the Great Barrier Reef, which he made in collaboration with his wife, fellow musician Kitty Gelhor.
In 1930, Fox-Movietone News ran some of his shorter documentaries as part of their newsreels in Australia and the USA, and from the next year the Monkmans produced a series of educational films in association with Frank Thring (father of the actor Frank Thring), who’d cashed out his fortune from running Hoyts Theatres and was trying to establish a film studio in Melbourne, Efftee. Offspring aside, Thring is best remembered for his features, but he had his fingers in a lot of pies, including stage musicals and educational shorts like those made by Noel and Kitty.
It is only natural that Thring and the Monkmans would discuss whether to collaborate on a feature. This made sense – the Monkmans did not have a background in producing drama but would have picked up a thing or two from the orchestra pit, and they knew how to film outdoors in exotic locations, while Thring’s films tended to be stage adaptations set indoors. But Thring knew drama very well, and had plenty of potential stories and crew under option.
In 1934, it was announced that Thring and Noel Monkman would work on Desert Saga, from a story by novelist William Hatfield; then they were linked with a film adaptation of the novel A Recipe in Rubber. For whatever reason, these projects did not happen (Desert Saga may have been dropped for another Hatfield story, Sheepmates, which started filming and was abandoned), and instead the project became Typhoon Treasure.
Typhoon Treasure, based on a script by Thring’s in-house writer, John MacLeod, told the story of Alan Richards, a pearler whose lugger is wrecked in a storm. He is rescued by Pasifika locals, and goes to retrieve the pearls in the jungle (in New Guinea) with the aid of a friend, Scotty, facing the elements and various baddies. You can read a newspaper serialisation of the script here and view a copy of the film via the National Film and Sound Archive.
Before filming could proceed, Thring died of cancer, putting Typhoon Treasure into limbo, and robbing the Australian film industry of one of its most passionate political advocates. Apparently, Cinesound (the studio of Ken G. Hall) wanted to buy the script – maybe they wanted to take the project off the market as they had their own pearling movie planned, Lovers and Luggers.
Monkman elected to raise the money himself. He formed a syndicate in association with Commonwealth Film Laboratories and was successful in raising a small budget – in 1935 a quota for Australian films had been introduced in New South Wales, and the industry was in a bullish mood (spoilers: the quota wasn’t enforced and this proved to be a false dawn).
Monkman leaned very much into his strengths for Typhoon Treasure and decided to film the movie on location in North Queensland – specifically, in and around Cairns although there would be some studio work in Sydney. Monkman assembled a pretty good team too. The cinematographer was George Malcolm [left, with Monkman on set], the designer was Jim Coleman who’d worked on assorted Australian silent films and for Chauvel (Coleman died during pre-production).
One of the reasons that we have a soft spot for Typhoon Treasure is its cast, because it features three of our favourite Australian actors from the 1930s. The female lead was Gwen Munro, a beautiful and sparky society girl keen on acting who’d made a splash in Ken G Hall’s Orphan in the Wilderness; she would later marry an American naval officer. The comic lead was Joe Valli, a Scottish comic who’d become nationally famous in his stage shows playing soldiers; he was possibly the busiest character actor in Australian films until a cancer operation robbed him of his voice in 1948, forcing him to eke out a living in such jobs as caretaker on Dangar Island (where the Monkmans lived for a time – maybe they got him the gig). The male lead was Campbell Copelin, a suave, round-faced actor who specialised in playing cads, sort of like an antipodean George Sanders; Copelin was a real character who would do things like steal airplanes when drunk and crash them in golf courses… and survive. The biggest non white role went to a Torres Strait islander, Utan, who played a guide that gets speared in the back – Utan had some local fame for helping people in a lugger accident during a cyclone in Cooktown; one review called him “a magnificent specimen of Island manhood”, although Utan doesn’t get that much screen time.
The movie included a number of underwater scenes. Bruce Cummings was in charge of these, helped by assistant James Bell. One day, the unit was filming at Green Island, with both Cummings and Bell underwater; the former noticed something was wrong with Bell who did not seem to hold his life line. He arranged for Bell to be pulled up and when they unscrewed the face glass they saw was Bell was dead. An inquest blamed a heart attack.
Typhoon Treasure came out in 1938, and as mentioned, had a decent enough run in Australia and overseas – it was playing in American cinemas as late as 1950, then was screened on television (apparently it was re-cut and distributed as Pakema Reef). The movie should have returned a profit, though one never knows. Assisted by a NSW Government overdraft guarantee, the Monkmans did manage to raise finance for another feature in 1941, The Power and the Glory, co-starring Peter Finch. Ultimately, they found the battle to make features too difficult and focused on documentaries, microscopes, cinemicography and photomicrography for the rest of Monkman’s distinguished career. In 1945, a New Zealand woman claimed Noel Monkman was her long lost husband and sued for desertion which sounds random – he defeated the case.
We’ll be honest here about Typhoon Treasure – the movie is creaky. Continuity is odd, the public domain music score (including extracts from Swan Lake) is annoying, some of the acting is erratic, the pacing is all over the place, shots don’t always match, you can tell it was made by someone inexperienced in drama, and it’s about as racially sensitive as you’d expect from a 1938 film set in New Guinea, then an Australian colony. (We’re not doing a hard sell here, as you can see.)
But, there are so many things about the movie that are endearing – the liveliness of Gwen Munro (a screen natural who should’ve had a bigger part), the location work, the notion of lounge lizard Campbell Copelin playing an action man and doing quite well, the spectacle of actors genuinely paddling in canoes and climbing down rocks, its utter lack of pretension and determination to entertain. Had the quota been enforced, Noel Monkman would have become a significant feature director of adventure movies – he and his wife still had a fine career, but it’s not what it could and should have been.
The author would like to thank Graham Shirley and the National Film and Sound Archive for their assistance with this article. Unless otherwise specified, all opinions are those of the author.
