by Stephen Vagg
When fans of Australian TV and film think of on-screen depictions of the Vietnam War, chances are they will recall those excellent ‘80s mini-series, Sword of Honour and Vietnam, or movies like The Odd Angry Shot, Danger Close, and The Siege of Firebase Gloria (which is Australian enough). Or maybe even the Dannii Minogue-starring TV series from Crawfords, All the Way.
These were all “looking back” stories. In my Gen X snobbishness, I assumed that there were no contemporary Australian screen accounts of our involvement in the Vietnam War – surely it was too polarising? Too controversial? But I was wrong.
The best known is the 1967 TV mini-series You Can’t See Round Corners, which took Jon Cleary’s World War Two novel about a deserter and updated it to Vietnam. It was re-filmed a few years later as a feature.
There was also Objector, a 1966 episode of the anthology series Australian Playhouse, written by Tony Morphett, about a young man (John Derum) who is a conscientious objector, which upsets his dad.
The following year saw the production of the oddest of them all, Shadow on the Wall. What makes this so fascinating is that it was an Australian-written, acted and produced story of the Vietnam War told from the point of view of the North Vietnamese. It does not have a single Australian character in it.
And yes, there is yellow face.
It was shot at ABC’s studios in Ripponlea, Melbourne, in April 1967. It was meant to be an episode for Australian Playhouse, but it had not screened under that umbrella; for whatever reason (quality control? political sensitivities?), Shadow on the Wall was not shown until the following year, when it aired as an episode of another anthology series, Wednesday Theatre.
Shadow on the Wall was directed by Chris Muir and written by Ru Pullen. Pullen’s credits include journalism, a lot of radio, and the 1949 feature film Strong is the Seed, which has perhaps the most boring idea for a biopic in cinema history: the story of the inventor of rust-resistant wheat.
Anyway, back to Shadow on the Wall. It is set in the North Vietnamese village of Cam Vao, where the locals are rioting over the presence of a prisoner being kept in a cell by the communists. The prisoner is never seen, depicted only as a shadow on the wall (get it?), but it is established that he has done some Mysterious Thing, although we aren’t told at first what that Mysterious Thing is.
Commissar Kin (Mark Albiston) arrives from Hanoi to find out what is going on from the local commandant, Captain Yun (Alan Tobin). Yun assures Kin he’s got it all in hand and spends the bulk of the running time trying to get various witnesses to sign a document stating that the prisoner is a regular person and not responsible for the Mysterious Thing. The witnesses include a bishop (Keith Lee), an informer (Michael Duffield), a barmaid (Lyndall Rowe) whose sex life Kin is really interested in, and an alcoholic farmer (Joseph James).
It’s not until the very end that we are told about the Mysterious Thing. What happened was (SPOILERS) the alcoholic farmer committed a robbery to feed his starving family, killed a guard, but then the prisoner miraculously brought the guard back to life. And the prisoner had nail scars on his hands and feet. This upsets Yun (who has just raped the barmaid, incidentally); he storms into the cell, and executes the prisoner. Kin comes back, Yun says something else weird has happened, then the commandant walks into the mob outside who, it is implied, kill him. Kin checks the cell to discover the prisoner’s body is gone, and the light of a cross is on the wall (another shadow on the wall!). He stares at it. The end.
So, it’s a… Christ parable, I guess?
Shadow on the Wall is completely bonkers, one of those TV plays that you can’t believe exists even when you’re watching it. To contextualise, it was made in 1967, when Australian troops were fighting in the Vietnam War and tells a story about North Vietnamese characters (I was not sure what nationality the Bishop was supposed to be, but everyone else is Vietnamese). The war is touched on – there’s a picture of Ho Chi Minh on a hut wall, for instance – but is mostly about an incident involving a Christ-like figure.
I think. Because the script is confusing in places. Ru Pullan made the classic mistake of trying to shove in too much story and too many characters for a thirty-minute running time; this needed to go for at least an hour, or to have characters removed from the script. (The rape seems particularly extraneous.) I had to watch it a few times to get what happened.
But it is utterly fascinating. I’d love to know more about the circumstances of its production. Was it made to placate the Democratic Labour Party [DLP], with its brave bishop, nasty commies and Christ-like figure? Did it need army approval? Were other pieces like this written around the time?
Anyway, Shadow on the Wall. To my knowledge the only Australian television drama to tell a Vietnam War story entirely from the point of view of the North Vietnamese.
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