by Stephen Vagg
The sixth and final chapter in our series on the 1950s producing career of Lee Robinson and Chips Rafferty. It focuses on the production of The Restless and the Damned, aka the movie that killed them (and thus, the chance of an Australian film industry in the 1960s) for good.
The previous five parts of this series have told the story of Robinson and Rafferty as producers – how they started smart and small with The Phantom Stockman, kept smart and got bigger with King of the Coral Sea and Walk into Paradise, then got big and dumb with Dust in the Sun and The Stowaway. Those latter two films – plus buying a studio complex in Sydney – wounded the Rafferty-Robinson operation; making The Restless and the Damned was the final blow.
A hit movie from the team might, just possibly, have saved Robinson and Rafferty as a filmmaking force. If they’d managed another Walk into Paradise, say, or even just been able to focus on their work for US television (they were helping make episodes of High Adventure for Lowell Thomas), they might have been able to wrangle an extra infusion of funds to keep going.
It didn’t happen.
In fact, The Restless and the Damned appears to have been the least successful film out of the six features that they made. This is a guess, we have no access to specific financial data, but we can confirm that the film only received a small release in France (it was their third co-production with the French), was never released theatrically in Australia, England or the US (as far as we can tell), although it popped up on American television in the ‘60s. We managed to access a copy via the National Film and Sound Archive under the title of The Dispossessed. It was also known as The Climbers, The Ambitious One and L’Ambitieuse, but we’ll use The Restless and the Damned for this piece.
The film, based on a novel by François Ponthier, tells the story of Dominque, an ambitious French woman, who encourages her husband George to double cross his boss Buchanan, at the Tahitian tin mine where they work. George and Dominique become rich but then he falls for another woman, Claire, driving Dominique to murder.
If The Stowaway felt like it could have been made at Warner Bros in the 1940s with Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, The Restless and the Damned feels like a Joan Crawford movie from the same studio and time period. There’s nothing intrinsically “Tahitian” about the story – it all could have taken place in a city somewhere (indeed, there’s a big section of the film set in France).
Having said that, the filmmakers made an effort to shoot more scenes outdoors than The Stowaway, and quite well: it’s full of interesting compositions, colour and movement. It’s nice, if kind of wasted on this movie – one wishes that it had been done on Dust in the Sun and The Stowaway instead.
Furthermore, a Joan Crawford movie needs a Joan Crawford level of star, and The Restless and the Damned had Andréa Parisy, who, while coming off a big hit in Young Sinners, did not have an international reputation. If the movie had showcased a female lead with real fame – a Brigitte Bardot, say, or Danielle Darrieux or Martine Carol (who would have been better employed here than in The Stowaway), or even Joan Crawford herself, who was still around, maybe it would have made more of a splash.
Incidentally, the Joan Crawford casting idea isn’t so outlandish considering the film had two Hollywood names – Richard Basehart (who played the husband) and Edmond O’Brien (his boss). Neither were genuine box office stars the way Crawford was, even in the 1950s – both were, rather, well-established character actors and occasional leading men; O’Brien had won an Oscar for The Barefoot Contessa while Basehart had been in Moby Dick and La Strada. Either of their roles could have been played by Chips Rafferty, incidentally – it was within his range to play a pushed-around husband or arrogant boss – but once more, he was overlooked as a casting option by his own production company.
At heart, The Restless and the Damned is an old school programmer. We actually feel that it works better in a way than The Stowaway – it’s smoother, more coherent and fully realised. Part of this is due to the direction: according to historians Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper, the film started out with two directors, Lee Robinson (English version) and Yves Allegret (French version) but after a few days filming, Allegret wound up filming both, although they didn’t explain why. It may have been Robinson deferring to Allegret’s superior skill: the latter was a very highly regarded director in his day – as was his brother Marc – with credits including two Gerard Philippe classics, Such a Pretty Little Beach and The Proud and the Beautiful. (He once sorted mail for Leon Trotsky and was married to Simone Signoret, who dumped him for Yves Montand, which might explain why he responded to a story like The Restless and the Damned, about a conniving woman. We’re not saying Signoret was conniving, but we are saying that Allegret might’ve carried some emotional scars.)
It still feels odd that Robinson and Rafferty made the movie in the first place – a film noir type tale was so unlike their first three efforts, which made money, and closer to their fourth and fifth movies, which flopped. Admittedly, Restless and the Damned was shot in late 1958 – Dust in the Sun and The Stowaway hadn’t been released in English-speaking territories yet. Mind you, considering those films had been made in 1956 and 1957 respectively, the fact that they hadn’t been released yet should have been a red flag.
Possibly, Rafferty and Robinson were too distracted by other matters to pay attention. They were busy helping US journalist Lowell Thomas make episodes for his American TV series, High Adventure, and winding up in court for digging up skeletons in the Northern Territory while filming a special on Lasseter’s Lost Reef.
The French would provide the bulk of the finance for Restless and the Damned and were using Hollywood actors – that would have been impressive, although it shouldn’t have been. No offence to Edmond O’Brien and Richard Basehart, but they were only Edmond O’Brien and Richard Basehart at the box office, and the genre (South Seas film noir) was not a box office natural in the way that a straight up adventure/action picture might be. Maybe Rafferty and Robinson made the movie under a contractual obligation, although all press reports at the time refer to them signing a two-picture deal with a French company, and Restless and the Damned was a third film.
It’s a shame, because Lee Robinson told Graham Shirley that he and Rafferty invested something like 40,000 pounds in The Restless and the Damned – that’s a sizeable chunk of change, and would’ve been enough to make a low budget film along the lines of The Phantom Stockman: a sequel to Stockman, say, or a movie about Lasseter’s Reef using footage that they shot for Thomas, or a cheap war movie set in Timor? Or even just making no movie, focusing on work for Lowell Thomas.
By the end of 1959, Robinson and Rafferty’s company, Australian Television Enterprises, was in receivership and its studio complex was for sale. The Lee Robinson papers at the NFSA are full of angry investors asking for their money back. It never happened.
Rafferty restored his financial fortunes by being cast in MGM’s second version of Mutiny on the Bounty, the one with Marlon Brando – the film’s shooting (in Tahiti, ironically) dragged on forever, meaning Rafferty’s fee ballooned to such a degree that he was able to pay off his personal debts and buy an investment property in Sydney that gave him financial security for the rest of his life. He also began regularly guest starring on American television shows, which were far keener to cast him than Australian producers (with a few exceptions like Storry Walton and Robinson, who used Rafferty on a few projects – we like that they managed to stay friendly). Eventually, Rafferty started getting regular work in Australia as well, ending his career on a high with memorable turns in Spyforce and Wake in Fright before dying in 1971.
Robinson got back on his feet working for a new company, Waratah Productions, who applied unsuccessfully for a third commercial television licence and made shows such as Adventure Unlimited and The Dawn Fraser Story. Robinson did some production work on They’re a Weird Mob, starting a professional relationship with John McCallum which lasted many decades, producing shows such as Skippy and films like Attack Force Z. He lived long enough to see his first three features re-discovered, although his second three continue to be ignored.
What lessons can be learned from The Restless and the Damned?
- Lean into your strengths, downplay your weaknesses. This was the third film in a row where Robinson didn’t do that, although he varied it slightly this time – the movie didn’t lack location work, but it didn’t need to be set in that location.
- Use stars suitable to the genre, who are actually stars. Richard Basehart and Edmond O’Brien were fine actors but not genuine box office names. They may as well have cast Chips Rafferty and used the money they saved on a big female star for the lead.
- Get your genre right. The film was a noir, only set outdoors. The market for that – if there had ever been a market – was gone by 1959.
We should add that The Restless and the Damned is still worth seeing. All the Robinson-Rafferty films are. It’s our dream that all the movies are released in some sort of boxset one day.
It’s just a shame that Lee Robinson and Chips Rafferty cracked the code of how to make movies successfully for three films in a row then lost the ability for their next three. It’s a lesson that needs remembering because it is possible to make successful features here.
Keep your costs down.
Have a point of difference.
Lean in to your advantages.
Downplay your weaknesses.
Don’t be dazzled by foreigners, even ones with good resumes.
Don’t try to be something that you’re not.
Do the story basics.
If you have access to a cheap star, use them – don’t pay overs for a star who is not worth it.
Still, what they did was wonderful. Six features in what was then one of the most hostile filmmaking environments around – that’s not bad.
The author would like to thank Graham Shirley and the National Film and Sound Archive for their assistance with this piece. Unless otherwise specified, all opinions are those of the author.
