Forgotten Australian TV Plays: I Found Joe Barton

by Stephen Vagg

The first television drama ever shot in Australia wasn’t The Twelve Pound Look (1956), which was shown on the first night the ABC broadcast TV. It wasn’t The Adventures of London John Silver, which was filmed for international markets in and around Sydney in 1954 and 1955. It was the proposed pilot for a TV series called The Adventures of Al Munch, filmed in Sydney in 1952, four years before television actually started broadcasting here.

The series was the brainchild of American radio producer Grace Gibson, one of the largest packagers of radio drama in Sydney. (Someone should do a series based on Gibson – the story of a plucky immigrant woman who came out here and worked her way to the top in a competitive field has great drama). Television was not introduced in Australia until 1956, but it was booming in America and the internationally-minded Gibson thought there might be a market for a show using Australian cast, crew and locations, but American writers and directors.

The Adventures of Al Munch would be a private eye series centering around the titular character, an American GI who had served in Australia during World War Two and elected to stay on and work in Sydney, “the big town down under” (to quote the pilot), as a PI. It would be an American show told in an American style transplanted to Australian shores.

Incidentally, this was completely consistent with the numerous American-style dramas made by the local Australian radio industry at the time, such as Night Beat and I Hate Crime; most of those, while starring, written and directed by Australians, took place in America – at least Al Munch would be set in Australia. And it’s not hard to see the appeal of a show about an American in Australia to someone like Grace Gibson.

It was decided to use a local actor to play the lead character, presumably for cost reasons. The bulk of Australian actors at the time were familiar with using American accents on radio and theatre – indeed, in the 1950s they would have used them more often than Australian accents.

Gibson originally arranged for Ken G. Hall of Cinesound fame to direct a test scene featuring Alan White, a highly regarded radio actor of the time, as Munch. She sent the test footage on to some American colleagues, but they were not impressed, so American director Francis D. Lyon was flown out in March 1952 to shoot some new screen tests. Lyon tried out different actors as Munch: Alan White again, Joe McCormack (an American actor who had moved to Australia), Ken Wayne (an Australian actor who specialised in American tough guys), and Bud Tingwell.

Tingwell recalled in an interview with Don Storey that the producers showed the different tests to the office staff – “the typists, the cleaners, the canteen people… typical people, not high-tech brilliant producers and technicians” – and it was they who made the final decision. They picked Tingwell, who was easily the best-looking of the candidates; while the actor became legendary as cuddly older character actor “Uncle Bud”, Al Munch was made during Tingwell’s sexy leading man phase.

The pilot, written by American Jackson Gillis, was shot in ten days in and around Sydney under the direction of Lyon. (Reviews say it was shot in two days but Tingwell says ten and I’m inclined to believe him because there’s a bit of location work.)

The plot (I’m going to give SPOILERS here) has private eye Munch hired to find Joe Barton, an American crime figure thought to be living in Australia. Munch’s client is Hollywood producer Frankoff (Ron Whelan), who has made a film of Barton’s life; Frankoff originally thought Barton was dead, but has since been contacted by a person claiming to be Barton threatening to hold up the film’s release unless he is paid a $50,000 clearance fee. Munch contacts a lawyer, Timothy O’Leary, to help locate Barton, but then O’Leary is murdered. Munch is joined on the search by Barton’s ex-wife Florrie (Margo Lee) who is also looking for Barton. Munch discovers O’Leary went for a recent trip up the coast on a charter boat and decides to retrace the lawyer’s steps with Florrie. Munch abandons Florrie on the boat and arrives at an isolated cottage where he meets a man who calls himself Joe Barton (Lloyd Berrell). Barton is about to kill Munch when Florrie appears with a gun and shoots Barton dead in cold blood. Munch figures out “Joe Barton” wasn’t actually Joe Barton but an Australian actor hired by Florrie… the real Joe Barton is the captain of the charter boat. A fight ensues where Munch overpowers Florrie and the real Joe Barton, who are turned into the police.

The episode is a lot of fun to watch today if you don’t mind seeing all these American characters run around Sydney in what is basically an American story, complete with tough guy dialogue, a femme fatale, gunplay and a high death toll. There are campy laughs to be had with the producer holding a koala bear in his office, and Al Munch traipsing through the bush and seeing a kangaroo. There’s lovely location work of the Sydney CBD, Sydney Harbour and the bush. The photography is of extremely high quality and it helps immeasurably that it was all shot on film instead of video tape. The story itself is solid, with plenty of twists and turns; it is absolutely up to the standard by which it was to be measured (i.e. a 30 minute 1950s American detective show).

The acting is strong; Tingwell makes an ideal leading man, as he would later show in King of the Coral Sea (1954), and there’s a solid line up of support players including two of my favourites from this period, Lloyd Berrell and Margo Lee. The movie it reminded me of most was The Kangaroo Kid (1950), a “meat pie Western” starring Jock Mahoney as a detective solving crimes in Australia.

However, the series did not sell to American television. Tingwell claims this is because they wanted Gibson to guarantee 39 episodes in 39 weeks and she was not sure she would be able to fulfil this order. (Other sources said the intent was to make 52 episodes).

This understandably annoyed Tingwell, who had turned down a long-term contract from 20th Century Fox – offered after his appearance in The Desert Rats (1953) – in part because he thought he’d be making the series. In hindsight, Gibson was probably right to be cautious: production of early international television dramas shot in Australia tended to be fraught with behind the scenes turmoil (eg. The Adventures of Long John Silver, the 1959 Flying Doctors, Whiplash!).

The pilot did sell to an American distributor and play as a self-contained episode on independent TV stations in the US. In Australia, it screened as a support feature in cinemas in 1952 under the title of I Found Joe Barton. Gibson might have followed her radio colleague Hector Crawford into television but decided to stick with radio; it’s a shame, in a way, with her nous and skill I think she would have done well on the small screen. Still, she was a radio giant.

A copy of I Found Joe Barton is available at the National Film and Sound Archive if you want to view it. It is hokey but is an important piece of our screen heritage.