by Stephen Vagg
Our series on dodgy foreign screenplays filmed in Australia takes aim at the 1952 Hollywood epic Kangaroo.
After World War Two, the major Hollywood studios began making a lot of movies outside of Los Angeles. There were a number of reasons for this: labour costs were less (being away from those pesky unions); studios could use money they earned in foreign countries that they were unable to extract due to post-war currency restrictions (“frozen funds”); stars and directors could pay less tax if they were out of the country for a certain amount of time; and it enabled access to a variety of fresh locations – something that became increasingly important as films had to compete with television.
Daryl F. Zanuck, head of production at 20th Century Fox, was particularly enthusiastic about location filming after the war, green-lighting movies shot in places such as Mexico (The Captain from Castille), New York (Kiss of Death), Italy (The Prince of Foxes), Chicago (Calling Northside 777), Argentina (The Way of a Gaucho), and Connecticut (Boomerang).
In November 1948, Fox announced it would make a film set in Australia at the turn of the century called The Australian Story. (NB There were a number of different titles for this film – The Sundowner, The Land Down Under, The Bushranger, Kangaroo: The Australian Story, before settling on Kangaroo, although some copies carry the title Kangaroo: The Australian Story). It would be based on an original story by Martin Berkeley and produced by Robert Bassler.
There was a brief vogue around this time to make Hollywood movies about Australia and Australians – chiefly because, one imagines, more Americans had become aware of Australia’s existence during the Pacific War.
So, you had films like Abroad with Two Yanks, The Man from Down Under, Three Came Home, Under Capricorn, The Desert Rats, Botany Bay, The Sea Chase, Million Dollar Mermaid and Interrupted Melody, plus (ultimately unsuccessful) plans to make a film of The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, and a John Ford version of the Stingaree stories.
There’d been some Hollywood-financed B pictures filmed in Australia with stars to match – Rangle River, The Kangaroo Kid – but nothing on the scale of Kangaroo, which was going to be a big-budget “A” movie in Cinemascope with major actors.
Martin Berkeley was an experienced scribe, whose credits included some outdoorsy films for Bassler like The Green Grass of Wyoming (1948) and Smoky (1946). Berkely was famous for naming names to the House of UnAmerican Affairs Committee (HUAC) during the Hollywood “Red Scare” – he has been called HUAC’s “number-one friendly witness” because he provided more names and more thorough documentation than any other witness (something like 161 people). He deposited his papers with UCLA and we were able to read an early draft of the script for this film which became Kangaroo. It is dated 11 May 1949 and is called “Sundowner”.
Sundowner is set during the turn of the century, a period in Australian history not often filmed, even by ourselves (historical Australian movies tend to focus on convicts, the Gold Rush, the Depression, or various wars). Maybe Fox/Berkeley picked this because it was a time of the Federation drought from 1895-1903, a megadrought affecting a third of the country… the worst since European settlement (it’s still the worst in recorded history in Australia although we’ll no doubt top that soon).
The hero of Sundowner is a bushranger called Gordie (who became the Peter Lawford character in Kangaroo called Connor). We first meet Gordie in a coach, pretending to be a passenger who then reveals himself to be a criminal who proceeds to hold up his fellow passengers… a scene used in countless westerns.
Gordie has an accomplice, a fellow bushranger called Ned (who became the Richard Boone character, Gamble). Contrary to Gordie’s wishes, Ned kills a stagecoach passenger – a lawyer who is carrying papers about a wealthy station owner, McGuire, searching for his missing son. Gordie tells Ned to get lost, then goes to track down Mac (who became the Finlay Currie character in the film) and pretends to be his long lost son to make some money.
Mac’s huge property is suffering from the drought, but Mac gives Gordie a job, and the young man drops hints that he’s Mac’s son, which the old man eagerly gobbles up. Gordie develops romantic feelings for Mac’s daughter, Ivy (who became the Maureen O’Hara character, Dell) and she’s hot for him, but they can’t do anything about it, because she thinks Gordie is her brother. Then Ned turns up, demanding Gordie cut him in on the action, even suggesting that maybe he (Ned) could marry Ivy. By now, Gordie has developed a conscience and fallen in love with Ivy (as well as life at the ranch), so he refuses to go along with Ned. It rains, making the cattle and property now hugely valuable. Ned responds by stealing Mac’s cattle, but Gordie retrieves it, shooting Ned in the process. Gordie confesses to Mac and Ivy, and they forgive him.
Berkeley’s script for Sundowner is a perfectly decent meat pie Western. It’s not very original – an Alan Ladd movie around this time, Branded (1950), had a similar pretend-to-be-someone’s-son plot – but it makes sense and has plenty of action and romance with solid roles for a hero, heroine, villain and crusty old character actor. It doesn’t feel terribly Australian and Berkeley’s grasp of geography isn’t strong (for instance, Mac’s station is in Queensland and people are always ducking off to Melbourne). There really isn’t any point for the story be set in the 1900s… the 1850s or 1860s would’ve made far more sense, when bushranging and lawlessness was more prevalent (they had droughts back then, too). But these were all things that could have been easily fixed up with a quick polish.
Zanuck and Fox liked the Sundowner script enough to send people out to Australia to see if making a film there was feasible. This was done and Kangaroo (as it was subsequently titled) was greenlit.
Somewhere along the line, Martin Berkeley was replaced as writer. Either Fox wasn’t happy with his work, or the studio needed him elsewhere, or it wanted to try someone new (all common things). There were press announcements of other authors working on the film including Dudley Nichols and Norman Reilly Raine. In the end, Harry Kleiner, another regular writer at Fox, receives credit, but Berkeley receives “story by” credit and his screenplay for Sundowner is very clearly the basis for Kangaroo. In fact, for all its faults, Berkeley’s script is far superior to the final movie. We’ll go into that in more detail later on.
The original director announced for the project was Louis King, who specialised in adventure stories and Westerns. This made sense since King had just made Green Grass of Wyoming with Bassler and Berkeley. However, in July 1950 Fox announced that Lewis Milestone [left] would direct the movie instead.
This was regarded as something of a coup: Milestone was an extremely highly regarded filmmaker, who had won Oscars for Two Arabian Knights (1927) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and his subsequent credits contained a lot of great films like The Front Page (1931), Rain (1932), Of Mice and Men (1939), Edge of Darkness (1943) with Aussie Errol Flynn, The North Star (1943), and A Walk in the Sun (1945). When Milestone made Kangaroo, his career was going through a bit of a slump; this was partly because he’d just made a big flop, Arch of Triumph (1948), but also because he was left wing (The North Star was a pro-Russian movie), accused of being a communist during the Red Scare. Milestone wasn’t ever blacklisted but he was slightly grey listed – which may explain why Martin Berkeley didn’t stay on the film… (although we have no proof). (After making Kangaroo, Milestone gave testimony to HUAC in closed session.)
Milestone’s career was pulled out of its slump by Daryl F. Zanuck, who hired him for three movies in a row at Fox: Halls of Montezuma, Kangaroo and a remake of Les Miserables. Despite his erratic commercial record, Milestone was highly regarded and appointing him as director on Kangaroo over Louis King indicated Zanuck/Fox had high hopes for this film. However, Zanuck had reservations, as indicated by a memo he sent to the director, which included some very frank advice. We quote from it below:
“Now purely as your friend and on a personal and confidential basis, I will tell you what I think about you and your work. You are a highly talented individual. Your main talent is your ability to direct. I believe you can contribute business and ideas to a finished script and that you can give much in the way of characterisation. I think it is fatal for you when you try to do anything in addition.
“You have a perfect knack for picking the wrong story, and I think that more than anything else, this has contributed to the “bad luck” you have had in the past four or five years. Not one of the pictures you were associated with, with the exception of Arch of Triumph, should ever have been attempted, and on Arch of Triumph, where you had practically complete authority as both producer and director, you made one of the worst pictures I have ever seen in my life…
“You were blessed with the talent of directing and the ability to enthuse a company. You know your job in this category, and you know it well. You do not have to take a back seat to anyone.
“Right now, you will need more than the one good credit for Montezuma to rehabilitate yourself in the eyes of this suspicious and calloused industry. In all probability, you will not listen to me and you will embark on another adventure, which will end up unproduced like the last one… If you listen to me, you will settle down, at least for the next year or two, to the job of doing what you can do best — directing.
“I am saying the above not because I am trying to encourage you on the idea of going on this next expedition, but because I admire anybody with real talent, and I hate to see it wasted or diffused.”
Milestone’s biographer Harlow Robinson (who wrote a superb book on the director, Lewis Milestone: Life and Films) wrote:
“Zanuck’s frank assessment of Milestone’s recent career doldrums must have stung, but it contained some hard truths. When Milestone focused on directing — rather than writing or producing — he produced his best results. When he tried to assume other responsibilities on a picture, he became distracted and often made bad choices. And despite his belief in his literary acumen, he had a poor record in choosing subjects for adaptation to the screen. His proudly stated inability to get along with the front office, led him to trust too much in his own judgment, without listening to well-meaning advice from knowledgeable colleagues.”
We quote that in full because the specific thing that Daryl Zanuck warned Milestone against doing – namely, taking over the script – happened on Kangaroo.
Various stars were announced for the movie, including Tyrone Power (who was linked with every big budget historical epic Fox made around this time) and Errol Flynn (who would’ve been amazing). Eventually, the four leads went to Peter Lawford (borrowed from MGM, as the heroic male lead), Richard Boone (as his dodgy friend), Finlay Currie (crusty ranch owner) and Maureen O’Hara (hot daughter). None of these were really top-flight names, but all were high profile, especially O’Hara. The actress specifically asked to be cast in Kangaroo – according to her memoirs, Zanuck had originally cast his mistress, Irish actress Constance Smith, as the female lead but she was let go when O’Hara, who was a much bigger star, expressed interest in playing the part. (Smith was instead assigned to The 13th Letter; she was then married to Bryan Forbes, but they soon divorced; Smith later went to prison for stabbing her boyfriend, the filmmaker Paul Rotha, who she later married. Interesting person, Constance Smith. Google her.)
Milestone arrived in Australia in 1950 and started whining about the quality of the restaurants, the lack of nightlife, and Berkeley’s script. He later claimed he asked Fox “to scrap the damned scenario they’d sent me out with, which was a joke” and instead film two novels by journalist Brian Penton about a family in colonial Queensland, The Landtakers and The Inheritors. The studio understandably refused – the film had been scripted, cast, budgeted and greenlit. So instead, Milestone promptly set about doing exactly what Zanuck had asked him not to do, and had the script rewritten by Harry Kleiner, who had come out with him to Australia. And because it took a long time to reach Australia from Hollywood in 1950, there wasn’t much that Fox could do (apparently) to stop them.
Milestone later recalled, “I fell back to my second line trenches and resolved to narrow down the human story to the minimum and concentrate on the animal’s plight in the drought. That way, we came out of the venture with something, whereas otherwise, we would have had nothing.”
Yes, you read that right. Milestone had the script for Kangaroo rewritten to “narrow the human story down to a minimum.”
O’Hara later wrote “I was heartbroken when I was given the revised shooting script in Sydney and saw how it had been ruined… Milestone had rewritten Martin Berkeley’s story and made it about a man and his conscience struggling with the question, ‘Are you a sinner if you only think about sinning or do you actually have to commit the sin to be guilty?’ It was the worst piece of rubbish I had ever read. He had destroyed a good, straightforward western.”
O’Hara claims she contacted her lawyer and tried to get out of the film, but was told “I would be creating a huge political incident if I walked off the picture. I had no choice but to do it or be in serious trouble.”
Filming commenced in Sydney in November 1950, transferring to Port Augusta in South Australia (whose then-premier, Thomas Playford, was an enthusiastic supporter of the film). It wrapped in February 1951, costing a reported 900,000 pounds. Kangaroo was released in theatres the following year and performed underwhelmingly critically and commercially, even in Australia. We’re not sure whether it made a profit over time: Fox allowed the movie to lapse into the public domain, so perhaps not.
So, what did Milestone (and Kleiner) ultimately turn Kangaroo into?
The hero, played by Peter Lawford, is now called Richard Connor rather than Gordie. Instead of starting the film with him holding up a stagecoach, he’s just a young man stranded in Sydney trying to get home, although he is willing to commit robbery to raise money. Instead of reading about the rich rancher McGuire (Finlay Currie) via some legal papers, he runs into McGuire at a boarding house where the drunken old man confuses Connor for his long lost son. Then Connor meets a fellow foreigner, John Gamble (the Ned character, played by Richard Boone). The two men rob a gambling house during the course of which Gambler shoots the owner dead. Connor and Gamble go back to the boarding house, find McGuire passed out, and while rifling through the latter’s possessions, discover information about McGuire’s business dealings. They decide to hide from the officials by posing as McGuire’s business partners and visiting his ranch.
Connor and Gamble arrive at the ranch, which is suffering in drought, and meet McGuire’s daughter Dell. Connor drops hints that he’s McGuire’s son, and they help the McGuires around the place, doing things like rescuing cattle and repairing a windmill damaged in the storm. McGuire eventually tells Nell that Connor is his son, which upsets her, because she’s fallen in love with him (although it’s never clear when exactly), but Connor confesses the truth. He and Gamble flee the station, chased after by policeman Len (Chips Rafferty). Gamble goes to shoot Len, but Connor saves the day by killing Gamble via a whip duel. Nell and McGuire forgive Connor and promise to wait for him when he gets out of prison.
Okay let’s break this down.
First of all, we should acknowledge that some additions from Milestone/Kleiner improve what Martin Berkeley came up with. The dialogue is much, much better. The addition of a two up game at a gambling house is great, as is the addition of the Len character – a policeman friend of the McGuires, who is constantly hanging around. The film is full of memorable visual sequences – Milestone was a skilled stylist, far more so than Louis King. But as Zanuck pointed out, Milestone was poor on story and most of the changes he and Kleiner made to Martin Berkeley’s script made it worse.
To start off, it was a major mistake to have Peter Lawford and Richard Boone meet at the beginning of the film as it meant there’s no history between the characters (we will use the names of the actors for ease of reference). In Berkeley’s original, Lawford and Boone are brothers, with a history of robbing stagecoaches together, so they have a very strong link – it makes it more understandable why Lawford doesn’t turn on Boone, and gives him a bigger dramatic dilemma at the end (i.e. old family versus new family). In Kangaroo, Lawford and Boone barely know each other, so they have no real bond – though you could possibly do a queer reading of this relationship, like you could for most 1950s Westerns with a hero and anti-hero; Boone certainly plays the role like Lawford’s his bitch. Furthermore, Maureen O’Hara claims in her memoirs that during filming, Lawford and Boone were caught by the police in a male brothel, and she had to help keep it out of the papers. Anyway, enough scuttlebutt….
Milestone consistently makes changes throughout the film that weaken Lawford’s character. In the original, Lawford tells Boone to take a hike immediately after the latter kills someone, which makes Lawford tough and principled. In Kangaroo, Lawford weakly goes along with Boone even after Boone’s committed murder, making Lawford seem pathetic and passive. In Sundowner, the Lawford character spends a lot of the time without Boone, and is given a lot of heroic stuff to do: he rescues Maureen O’Hara from a storm, develops a strong relationship with Finlay Currie, digs a well that saves the ranch from drought, rescues cattle when Boone tries to steal it, and decides to confess.
But Milestone wrecks that in the final film by (a) keeping Richard Boone in the movie the whole time (b) putting Boone in a heap more scenes with Peter Lawford and (c) getting Richard Boone’s character to make most of the key decisions. In the Milestone version, it’s Richard Boone who decides to rob the gambling house, who calls “raid” so there’s pandemonium enabling he and Lawford to escape, and who bribes the crew member to get on the ship with Finlay Currie – Lawford just follows him. When Chips Rafferty turns up at the ranch, it’s Richard Boone who says that they should stay when Peter Lawford wants to run away. When the windmill on the ranch collapses, it’s Richard Boone who goes up on the windmill first. At the end of the film, it’s Richard Boone who tells Peter Lawford to confess, while Boone decides to run away.
This favouritism towards Boone isn’t limited to script changes – whenever Boone and Lawford are in a shot together, Milestone generally gives more space to Boone in the frame. And both Boone and Lawford are even dressed nearly identically, with similar moustaches, costuming and hairstyles – surely that’s directing 101, to make sure the characters appear differently?
Peter Lawford does hardly anything heroic in Kangaroo. He defends Finlay Currie with a knife at the flophouse, saves Richard Boone at the windmill and beats him in a whip duel. But that’s not much, not for a hero, and far less than what his character did in Sundowner. Lawford barely spends any time romancing Maureen O’Hara or bonding with Currie in Kangaroo. Indeed, the way the film is constructed, you could have cut Lawford out of the film and that’s a big problem when you’re talking about your romantic male lead.
We think the reason for this is Milestone preferred Richard Boone as an actor to Peter Lawford (the director had just made Halls of Montezuma with Boone). Now, there’s no doubt that Boone is a much better performer than Lawford – Boone’s work in Kangaroo is superb, and Lawford is a wet fish actor who could never really hold the screen in a heroic part (he was generally better as a leading man for a female star, or a second lead to a more charismatic male star). But in Lawford’s defence, his character is totally emasculated in Kangaroo.
It seems that when Milestone was given a weak actor to play the hero and a strong actor to play the villain, he decided to “fix” the problem by giving more of the hero’s role to the villain. However, he only ended up turning the hero into more of a sidekick, and the villain into an unsatisfactory villain. If Milestone disliked Lawford that much, he should have had Boone and Lawford swap roles – although in fairness, no one thought of Boone as a leading man at the time (his great success on TV in Have Gun Will Travel was several years away).
(Sidebar: You know who would’ve been better than Lawford, who was handsome, could act and was actually in the cast? Charles Tingwell, who has an unsatisfactory subplot playing a shifty ranch worker. But Tingwell was then totally unknown in the USA – although his performance encouraged Fox to import him and Chips Rafferty to play Aussies in the Hollywood-shot The Desert Rats).
Also damaging to the film is Milestone’s refusal to lean into the “pretending to be someone’s son” story concocted by Martin Berkeley – while still keeping enough of that storyline to make the end result feel unsatisfactory. As Berkeley’s original script proved, it’s super easy to write a film about someone pretending to be someone’s son – the story beats are obvious: the hero decides to pretend to be the old man’s son, the old man is overjoyed, he bonds with the young man, the young man feels guilty, the young man and the old man’s daughter are hot for each other but can’t be together because of incest, eventually the young man wants to confess but then his bad friend turns up, the young man redeems himself through heroism and becomes a hero, etc, etc.
But Milestone clearly hated that story and wanted to do something entirely different. And when he wasn’t allowed to, he responded like a spoilt child by minimising it, but still keeping enough, so the result is vague and confusing.
For instance, the original script has Peter Lawford and Richard Boone discover that Finlay Currie is looking for his son by finding papers on a dead lawyer; this is far more believable than the final film, which has Lawford randomly run into this old man in a boarding house who just happens to have a long lost son who just happens to look like Peter Lawford, on the exact same night that Lawford just happens to try and rob Richard Boone who just happens to want to rob a gambling house.
In Berkeley’s script, Peter Lawford’s plan to pretend to be Finlay Currie’s son is clear from the beginning. In Kangaroo, it’s never really clear when Lawford and Boone decide to start the plan and they never really commit to it, they just drop vague hints, and it’s never really clear when Currie starts to believe that Lawford is his son (at the end of the film, he says “I believed you were my son the day you came here” but we never see that). Most crucially, in a display of utter narrative incompetence, Currie doesn’t tell Maureen O’Hara that (he believes) Peter Lawford is his son until most of the movie is over (72 minutes in) – then the very scene this is done (the very same scene!), it is resolved by Lawford immediately confessing the truth. So, there’s no “I want you, but I can’t because you’re my sibling” sexual tension between Lawford and O’Hara, no ramping up of Lawford’s guilt, nothing for Maureen O’Hara to do in the whole movie, except kind of hang around.
In the original script, Lawford and O’Hara develop a real relationship: they have plenty of scenes together; there’s a plot where she goes away to “Melbourne” and comes back and talks about flirting with other men and Lawford gets all jealous; and there’s a scene where Lawford rescues O’Hara from a billabong in a dust storm and they develop a real bond; and Lawford gets jealous when Boone makes moves on O’Hara. Which is all cliched, yes, but better than what is in the final film, which is nothing. Cliches are cliches because on some level they work. And if you remove them, they need to be replaced by something else that works. You don’t put in a “romantic” scene between Lawford and O’Hara in the movie 55 minutes in where Lawford bitches to O’Hara how much he hates Australia and wants to go home, and O’Hara criticises him for wanting to go home – by that stage, Lawford should be falling in love with Australia and O’Hara, not whining. We never get a scene where we see Lawford and O’Hara be tender with each other, except at the end, where he refers to having all these feelings for her, but we’ve never really seen him have any feelings for her.
The original script had a proper third act, too, with Richard Boone turning up at the station. The stakes were thus really ramped up, because Boone knew all about Lawford’s criminal past; Boone suggests that he marry O’Hara, making Lawford angry; Lawford tries to pay off Boone but Boone wants more; then Boone steals Currie’s cattle, which meant the financial health of the ranch was at stake. This was all great. This doesn’t happen in Kangaroo because Boone has been here for the whole movie. The final act, if you can call it that, has Lawford and Boone meekly running away, Chips Rafferty going after them, Boone going to kill Rafferty (who we don’t really care about) and then Lawford killing Boone. That might’ve been okay, if you had Finlay Currie and Maureen O’Hara chasing after Lawford and Boone, but Milestone didn’t do that because he didn’t understand story. Sorry, auteurists, but he didn’t.
Maureen O’Hara was right – Kangaroo was a perfectly good Western, with a clear original concept (criminal pretends to be rich man’s son to fleece him), complication (criminal develops conscience, falls in love with his “sister” and Australia), further complication (criminal’s former accomplice appears) and resolution (criminal shoots accomplice).
But Lewis Milestone wasn’t interested in that. He didn’t care about the any of the characters except Richard Boone’s. What he was really interested in were incidentals: two up games, animals dying in drought, cattle mustering, Aboriginal dancers, tracking shots, windmills, dust. The tragedy of Kangaroo is that Milestone could have had all that stuff and still hit the basic story beats of Martin Berkeley’s script. The story of a man pretending to be someone’s son is hokey, but if you’re going to make a film based on that story, you’ve got to do it. You can’t try to skirt around it. Milestone tries to, despite specifically being warned not to by Daryl F. Zanuck, and it doesn’t work.
During filming Finlay Currie was asked about Australian films. He said, “I believe your own producers have concentrated too much on background and not enough on story. That is a pity. Even when your settings are interesting, they can’t compensate for a poor script. For it is the script that brings background alive.”
Currie was 100% correct – and this is exactly the mistake that Lewis Milestone made with Kangaroo.
If the tone of this article sounds irritable, well, we are annoyed, on behalf of the Australian film industry of the 1950s. Because if Kangaroo had been a hit, then Hollywood might’ve made a bunch more movies in Australia, and our governments might have been guilted into supporting local filmmakers twenty years earlier than they did, and the cinematic desert of 1950s and 1960s Australian cinema might have birthed a few more flowers.
We’re also irritated at auteurist critics who, over the years, have unthinkingly accepted Milestone’s version of events on Kangaroo, just because he was a director who blamed “the studio” and auteurists always side with the director. (We’re not going to name names because they might be still alive, and we don’t need to be hassled by some boomer raised on a diet of Sight and Sound and Colin Bennett.)
Milestone made several more movies in his career, including some with an Aussie connection such as Melba (1953) a biopic about the singer that no one likes, and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) which had Chips Rafferty in it. We’ll give Milestone this – his films are always interesting, even when bad, such as Kangaroo.
Kangaroo could have been a solid story, elevated by directorial touches, but ended up being a film of directorial touches with a damaged story. So, whenever someone launches into a spiel about how crap Australians are making films and how smart the Americans are, try asking that person “what about Lewis Milestone’s Kangaroo?”
The author would like to thank the library staff of UCLA for its assistance with this article. All opinions, unless otherwise expressed, are those of the author’s.
