by Stephen Vagg
The release of A Horse Named Winx has prompted us to look back on the history of Australian horse-related movies. Horses are a highly cinematic animal, and Australia is a horsey country, so it’s not surprising that we’ve shot a fair few equine sagas over the years. We came up with a list of the top five main subgenres.
1) Melbourne Cup footage
Australians love their sport, gambling and movies, so it’s not that surprising that our first locally produced and successfully screened cinema program included film of the 1896 Melbourne Cup. Yep, before even The Story of the Kelly Gang we made a Melbourne Cup movie – or rather Henry Barnett did, shooting footage of the race for the Lumiere Brothers. The movie (we guess you could call it a movie) was hugely popular, being seen all around the world, and helped the local industry get off to, if you’ll excuse the pun, a flying start. You can watch some vision of it here.
The Melbourne Cup was filmed pretty much constantly after that, including a 1904 version from noted director Franklyn Barrett, a 1915 attempt you can see here and 1930 aka Phar Lap’s year. And of course, the Melbourne Cup was dramatised in many of the movies discussed below (there’s going to be a lot of crossover in these sections).
2) Horse racing melodramas
Many silent Australian films had a horseracing theme – either they’d be bushranger stories with a horseracing sequence (eg Robbery Under Arms, Thunderbolt) or a flat-out horseracing melodrama. The latter were typically based on some pre-existing novel and/or stage play involving gangsters, blackmail, doping, bribed jockeys, ne’er-do-wells, comic servants, and a big race at the end. Examples of these films include The Cup Winner (which used footage from the real 1911 Melbourne Cup), Keane of Kalgoorlie, A Ticket in Tatts, The Double Event, Won on the Post, In the Last Stride (starring boxer Dave Smith), Silks and Saddles, A Rough Passage and Odds On. A lot of them were based on novels (and plays based on the novels) by Arthur Wright and Nat Gould – forgotten scribes now, but hugely popular in their day. Wright worked at Manly Wharf for six days a week and wrote on Sundays – I only mention him because he was hugely prolific and deserved a shout out.
You can watch all of Silks and Saddles here.
This tradition lingered on into the sound era where there were several horse racing melodramas such as Thoroughbred (1936), a Ken G. Hall movie heavily inspired by the Phar Lap story, and Into the Straight (1949), starring a young and hunky Charles Tingwell, which for some reason veers off into a subplot about a paraplegic piano player, but is still quite interesting to watch.
Later examples include Blue Fire Lady (1977), one of the more wholesome entries in the oeuvre of producer Tony Ginnane, and Danger Down Under (1988) with Lee Majors (one of those “an American goes outback” films from the 1980s that also included The Last Frontier, Outback Bound and Blue Lightning).
3) Horse racing comedies
These used many of the same elements as the above genre (gangsters, big race finale, etc) just in comic form. Examples include The Hayseeds’ Melbourne Cup (1918) (which used footage from a real Melbourne Cup), the George Wallace vehicle A Ticket in Tatts (1934) (ditto), Rupert Kathner’s Racing Luck (1941) (starring legendary jockey Darby Munro) and Stavros Kazantzidis’ Horseplay (2003) (which, while a comedy, probably has the highest death toll of any Australian horse movie).
4) “Girls/Boys own” horsey stories
These are basically family-friendly adventure tales on horseback with some dashing hero galloping around. Sometimes, they contain a big dollop of melodrama, but they’re differentiated from horseracing melodrama as they are not set in the horseracing world per se. Some of these tales are aimed specifically at the kids’ market (eg Saddle Club, Bush Christmas), others have an older demographic (The Squatter’s Daughter, Silks and Saddles, The Man from Snowy River, Cool Change, Silver Brumby, McLeod’s Daughters, Australia). I can’t understand why we don’t make these stories all the time.
5) Horsey Biopics
There are two main types of horse biopics – they either focus on the horse (Phar Lap, Archer) or the jockey (The Cup, Ride Like a Girl). As with most biopics, the more obstacles that can be overcome, the more successful the movie tends to be. Phar Lap had to take on the Depression, gangsters, and dastardly Americans; Ride Like a Girl faced sexism, family tragedy, and nuns. Oh, and to any aspiring producers out there, the following subjects would make ideal biopics: Tommy Smith, Bev Buckingham, Violet Murrell, Wilhelmina “Bill” Smith, Darby McCathy, and Patrobas. Give ‘em a google.
Special mention – Australian horses as movie stars
Occasionally, horses even get top billing in local films. For instance, director Beaumont Smith’s Desert Gold (1919) was a silent era horse melodrama starring the racehorse Desert Gold as herself, which is just too darn cute. Also, Aussie film star Snowy Baker had a regular horse, Boomerang, who appeared with him in the film Shadow of Lightning Ridge (1920); when Baker moved to the US, Boomerang went with him and they appeared together as a team in movies such as Sword of Valor, The Empire Builders, The White Panther, and His Last Race. Boomerang often was billed on posters, as “Boomerang the Wonder Horse”. So, there you go – years before Russell Crowe there was Boomerang the Wonder Horse. You can see old Boomer below.
