by Stephen Vagg
Bruce Stewart isn’t particularly well remembered as a writer these days, even by the standards of old television play scribes. It’s odd in a way, because he was very successful over a long period of time; on the other hand, it’s not that much of a shock: Stewart focused on television, which is so ephemeral, rather than films, novels or theatre; he never had a big iconic credit in the way that, say, Sumner Locke Elliott did with Careful He Might Hear You or Alan Seymour had with The One Day of the Year. Yet, he still had an incredible run and few of his works were more highly regarded than Shadow of a Pale Horse.
Stewart was actually a New Zealander, born in Auckland in 1925. He studied to become a priest for three years, then decided not to take vows, like a few people of his generation who became writers (Thomas Keneally, Michael Noonan, Morris West… I guess you do a lot of reading in the seminary). Stewart worked in New Zealand radio as an actor and announcer, crossing the Tasman in 1947 to try his luck in Sydney. He became a popular radio actor, playing the lead role in the famous spy thriller Dossier on Dumetrius, among others, and started writing soapies on the side.
There are always New Zealanders bustling around Australian showbusiness and Kiwi contemporaries of Stewart from this time included names like Michael Noonan, Douglas Stewart, Ruth Park, Lloyd Berrell, and Guy Doleman – all fellow Anzacs who Australians claim as theirs, when we feel like it. (Some of this material repeats stuff I wrote about in this piece on Stewart’s The Devil Makes Sunday.)
Stewart decided to try his luck in a bigger pond, London, and he moved over there in the mid-1950s (like Noonan, Berrell and Doleman). Stewart’s big break came when he sold his original television play, Shadow of a Pale Horse, to ITV. It was filmed in 1959, starring Patrick McGoohan (The Prisoner) and directed by Silvio Narizzano (Georgy Girl). The production was popular and launched Stewart’s career in Britain as a writer; he also kept acting from time to time, for instance in Alan Seymour’s Lean Liberty.
Shadow of a Pale Horse is set in a small town in western New South Wales in the 1800s. A man is found murdered next to a drunken ex-convict, Jem, who everyone assumes is the killer. When flooding cuts off the town from the nearest courtroom, the townsfolk decide to put Jem on trial themselves. A crusty weird Germanic prospector suggests that Jem be defended by Rigger, the father of the dead boy, and be prosecuted by Kirk, the ex-convict’s employer. For some reason, the townsfolk go along with this; I guess it makes dramatic sense because the town recognises it needs to calm down. Jem keeps talking about seeing a pale horse and everyone thinks he’s a liar. It’s kind of like an Australian Ox-Bow Incident.
The aforementioned plot description makes Shadow sound like a meat pie Western, with its isolated small-town setting, frontier justice and lynching threat, but the play is always Australian: only one person pulls out a gun, there’s no heroic sheriff, law and order is respected, and it touches on prejudice against ex-convicts. And we had lynchings here too, we just like not to think about it.
Some Canadian producers bought the rights to the script for Shadow of a Pale Horse and filmed it in Toronto for Canada’s General Motors Presents, with a cast including a young Patrick Macnee. However, General Motors then refused to put its name on the episode saying, “We don’t think this play is consistent with the kind of entertainment that has been presented to date on this series and the kind which we would like to have presented.” (Lynching is very bad manners, I guess.) The Canadians, to their credit, went ahead and showed the episode anyway, without a sponsor, and it was a success.
The Yanks bought the script too and filmed Shadow as an episode for The US Steel Hour starring Dan Duryea and Frank Lovejoy, which is cool. This put Stewart in the category of Antipodean writers at the time, whose work was filmed for American television, along with Sumner Locke Elliott, Alec Coppel, Michael Pate, Ivan Goff, Jon Cleary and Michael Plant.
Eventually, the Australians got around to filming Shadow of a Pale Horse in 1960. It became an episode of The General Motors Hour, a sporadic anthology series that aired on Channel Seven from 1960 to 1962. The first play was The Grey Nurse Said Nothing, and Shadow was the fourth. Both were directed by David Cahill. Australia’s General Motors, incidentally, didn’t share its Canadian colleagues’ concern about Shadow of a Pale Horse – their logo was all over the production.
The cast includes some top local actors of the day – Brian James (Kirk), Leonard Teale (Rigger), Henry Gilbert, Thelma Scott, etc. The production went for 80 minutes, but for some reason they showed a 60-minute version in Melbourne. Harry Dearth introduces the play for General Motors, smoking on air the cigarettes that would kill him a few years later.
The Australian Shadow of a Pale Horse is not flawless – James and Teale both have these terrible beards, which should not have been allowed on air, and the accents distract. But generally, the acting is strong (particularly James, John Gray and Ben Gabriel as townsfolk) and the story is extremely compelling. It doesn’t stuff around or sell out… (SPOILERS) – Jem is hung at the end even though innocent. The hanging sequence is very well handled by Cahill.
Stewart later turned Shadow of a Pale Horse into a stage play and sold the film rights, though no movie version was made. It was adapted for New Zealand radio in 1962. Stewart based himself in London for the rest of his career, working mostly in television. (He was the head writer on a TV series, Timeslip which some sci-fi fans may have heard of.) The ABC and commercial stations filmed a lot of foreign scripts in Australia in the 1960s, but apart from Shadow of a Pale Horse and Devil Makes Sunday, they ignored Stewart, even though several of his British television plays were set in Australia including Day of the Drongo, The Watchman of Saul and an adaptation of Harp of the South. Maybe executives were jealous of his talent, because Stewart was a really good writer. Shadow of a Pale Horse is worth checking out and a lot easier to do so than it used to be – the National Film and Sound Archive just digitised a copy.
The author would like to thank the National Film and Sound Archive for its assistance with his essay. All opinions are the author’s.
