by Stephen Vagg
This series looks at movies made in Australia, which wrecked perfectly good stories in the process.
Writers in Australian theatre/film/television of the 1950s and 1960s faced two main enemies (a) theatre owners/cinemas/broadcasters who simply didn’t want to pay for local product when they could more cheaply import stuff from overseas instead, and (b) cultural gatekeepers who thought local artists were useless. Of the two groups, the first were actually the most forgivable, because it was a matter of dollars and cents. The latter were far more insidious: heads of theatre companies, key (if not all) executives at the ABC and commercial stations, broadsheet critics, politicians… all had the ability to support local artists (indeed sometimes they were given public funds and helpful regulations specifically to assist them to do this) but they routinely disparaged the abilities of Australians. This was despite the fact it was a time when Australians were regularly being nominated for Oscars (John Farrow, Alec Coppel, Ivan Goff), top-lining international films (Errol Flynn, Ron Randell), theatre productions (Robert Helpmann, Margaret Williams, Cyril Ritchard, Robert Helpmann) and television drama (Sumner Locke Elliott, Michael Plant, Lynne Foster, Peter Yeldham), and clogging up best seller lists (Paul Brickhill, Morris West, Jon Cleary).
So, on the rare occasions foreign companies came to Australia to make movies, it made sense they assumed they knew best, even when doing an Australian story. Look, we get it – it’s their money. And sometimes this worked out well (The Overlanders, Bush Christmas, Smiley, The Shiralee, The Sundowners). But on other occasions it didn’t, and the newcomers would stuff up a perfectly good Australian story (Kangaroo, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Robbery Under Arms).
Such a case was the 1959 British film The Siege of Pinchgut.
The driving force behind Pinchgut was Harry Watt, a British director who had earned a tremendous reputation making (superb) documentaries in the 1930s and 1940s. He moved into dramatic features with Nine Men (1943), having his first big success with The Overlanders (1946). The latter was filmed in Australia during World War Two by Britain’s Ealing Studios at the behest of the Australian government, who asked for a film that reflected the antipodean contribution to the war effort. I mean, there were locals here who could’ve done that, and did (Forty Thousand Horsemen), but it’s got to be said, Ealing and Watt did superbly by Australia with The Overlanders. Watt came out here to look for a film idea and heard about a cattle drive through the outback to escape incoming Japanese – he instantly grasped its cinematic possibilities and proceeded to make a movie about it.
Indeed, The Overlanders has one of the best high concepts for an Australian picture ever: simple, clear, with an obvious beginning, middle and end, and plenty of opportunities for conflict, action, excitement and romance. It played to Watt’s strengths as a director in that it was filmed on location and was based on a true story. He also had great luck in finding the perfect stars (Chips Rafferty and Daphne Campbell).
Watt and Ealing decided to make more films in Australia, starting with Eureka Stockade (1949). This turned out less well. The Eureka Stockade story is one of those historical tales which sounds exciting (hotels burning down, troops storming forts, Peter Lalor losing an arm and romancing a teacher), but is actually tricky to adapt – at the end of the day, the drama does boils down to “Pay your mining licence!” vs “I’m not paying a mining licence!”. This is why all versions of this story flop. (The casting of Chips Rafferty as Lalor didn’t help.) The failure of this film and 1950’s Bitter Springs – which tried to re-heat many of the ingredients of The Overlanders, to less success – cooled Ealing’s enthusiasm for Australian stories. Watt revived his career heading over to what was then called East Africa and making the hugely popular Where No Vultures Fly (1951); this played more to his strengths: location filming, based on a true story, simple concept (game warden battles poachers while trying to establish a wildlife sanctuary).
Absence makes the heart grow fonder and in the mid-‘50s Australia became “hot” again, in the British film industry at least, with a series of hits containing Down Under content: A Town Like Alice (1956), Smiley (1957), and The Shiralee (1957). The latter was made by Ealing Studios and it’s probably what encouraged them to make The Siege of Pinchgut in Australia as well. Indeed, there was a mini boom in foreign-financed, Australia-shot/set productions at the end of the 1950s: Smiley Gets a Gun, the TV series Whiplash and The Flying Doctors, and adaptations of On the Beach, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and The Sundowners.
There were also several projects that wound up not being made but were announced in the press: a TV series based on the Stingaree novels; Inward Bound, a film about British migrants from a script by Ted Willis; Sara Dane, an adaption of Catherine Gaskin’s novel to star Sylvia Syms; Dig, a film of the Burke and Wills expedition to star Anthony Quayle from a script by Ralph Peterson; The Wrecker, from a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, from the team of Launder and Gilliat. The Siege of Pinchgut was thus part of a whole (short-lived, as it turned out) burst in production.
The history of Pinchgut goes back to the late 1940s. Britisher Inman Hunter was working as an editor on The Overlanders when he caught a ferry across Sydney Harbour and was struck by the sight of Fort Denison, a fort built on a small island in the middle of the harbour to repel possible American and Russian invaders. The island had a history of also being used as a place to stash particularly naughty convicts with limited rations – giving rise to the nickname “pinchgut”. Hunter thought the fort would make an ideal setting for a film and teamed with Lee Robinson, a documentary filmmaker and radio writer. They concocted a story about two German POWs who wind up at Pinchgut, take command of guns at the fort and demand to be taken to Argentina or else they’ll start blowing things up in Sydney. (Robinson told historian Graham Shirley, in an excellent oral history now held at the National Film and Sound Archive, that he was inspired by seeing posters in Australian post offices in 1947 of escaped Italian and German prisoners of war who were still at large in Australia.)
This is a fantastic idea for a movie, as good a high concept as, well, The Overlanders. It’s a “group of hostages held by baddies” story in the vein of The Petrified Forest, Key Largo or The Desperate Hours. There are protagonists with clear, logical motivations, and a spectacularly gorgeous setting.
We have never read the Robinson-Hunter script – originally called Saturday to Monday – but any half decent writer could have made an exciting film out of it. Robinson’s scripts for his early feature films (The Phantom Stockman, King of the Coral Sea) were always a little flabby, but a skilled pro could’ve built on what he and Hunter devised just by watching the aforementioned hostage movies and adapting the tropes. The film was announced for production in 1951, but in the end Robinson and Hunter couldn’t raise funds and wound up selling the script to Ealing.
The script lay dormant until reactivated in the late 1950s by Harry Watt, looking for a new project at Ealing. (He’d left the studio in 1955 to work in television but returned 18 months later). Watt was excited by the clear commercial potential of the Hunter-Robinson story – like The Overlanders, it was very high concept and involved location shooting, although it was not based on a true story in any way. Ealing likely felt the film could “breakthrough” to the American market – the company had signed a deal with the American studio MGM that had produced a number of fine movies (including The Shiralee and Dunkirk), but none had been well received in the US. Maybe Pinchgut would break the curse.
Watt [left] visited Sydney in early 1958 to do a recce, telling local journalists that the Robinson-Hunter story “was a hell of a good idea. But it now has a completely different set of characters.” Watt had decided to rewrite the original story to make it about an escaped convict seeking a retrial for being unjustly imprisoned. According to Robinson, “Harry had a bug about some bloke in England who’d been sent to gaol, and years later it’d been proven that he was innocent.”
Watt was a lefty, and his films included progressive politics for their day – concern about Aboriginal people in The Overlanders for instance, and animal conservation in Where No Vultures Fly. However, as pointed out by Lee Robinson to Graham Shirley, Watt’s changes to the Pinchgut story lessened the original’s inherent tension. German POWs were scarier because they were in enemy territory – you’d believe they’d be willing to blow up Sydney to get to safety. Escaped convicts wanting a retrial, not so much.
Indeed, the entire script of Pinchgut is a perfect example of how to take a terrifically suspenseful idea and suck all the tension out of it. The film gets to a great start with an ambulance containing the convicts fleeing through Sydney. But then the film (or, rather, its makers) makes a series of decisions which ruin the movie.
Watt was not the only guilty person here – novelists Jon Cleary (an Australian) and Alexander Baron (British) also worked on the screenplay, and Ealing’s production chief Michael Balcon was all over the project, but there seems little doubt the prime creative force behind the film was Watt.
There is the unnecessary vagueness of the goal from Matt Kirk, the main protagonist, played by Aldo Ray. “I want a retrial” he keeps bleating through the film. What was the crime? Was he innocent? Why was it a miscarriage of justice? Why not tell us? What sort of retrial does he think he’s going to get after threatening to blow up a city? Why not just have him bitter and want to get revenge?
Then there’s the motivations of Matt Kirk’s fellow convicts. There are three of them (the American title for the film was Four Desperate Men). Two kinda make sense – Matt’s brother Johnny is helping his brother, while an Italian, Luke, just wants to escape and gets understandably annoyed when Matt insists he stick around for a retrial. But there’s this other convict, Bert, who seems remarkably uninterested in what’s going on, whether to escape, or to stay on Pinchgut, or Matt’s retrial, or the fate of the hostages. You could actually cut Bert out of the film – his main function is to know about the guns and one of the other three convicts could have done that.
Watt is curiously reluctant to make any of his convicts a genuine threat. They don’t kill anyone. They don’t injure anyone or set off any explosions or fire the gun. They threaten the three hostages on Pinchgut (caretakers on the island, the Fulton family: mum, dad and their daughter Ann) but pretty half-heartedly. You keep waiting for one of the convicts to be revealed to be the “loose cannon psycho convict” and try to molest the daughter, which is the most standard trope ever in a hostage movie, but it doesn’t happen. Even when the police start killing off the convicts one by one, they don’t seem to get energised. The attitude of the cops, who evacuate the city, set up snipers along the Harbour Bridge and storm the island, guns a blazing, is far more forceful.
Matt Kirk becomes a little unhinged at the end but that is far too late in the day. Even then, when Matt finally decides to fire the guns, Watt is careful that things don’t get too exciting by having Johnny pull the firing pin, so the guns don’t work. During the whole final action sequence where the police storm the island, there’s nothing at stake. Matt doesn’t even go on a rampage and threaten to kill Ann or Johnny. Did Watt not understand the concept of rising dramatic stakes? Was that too “Hollywood”?
Was it also too Hollywood of him to avoid having a proper romance between Johnny and Ann? The film hints at it, but we never really see it, certainly not why they might have a future. Ann Fulton was played by Heather Sears, then a “name” coming off The Story of Esther Costello and Room at the Top (she’s billed above the title), but she barely has anything to do. Neither do the other two hostages, her parents – we kept waiting for one to be killed/sexually assaulted, and/or form their own unique relationship with one of the convicts, and/or turn against their fellow hostages in some way (all popular tropes) but… nope. They just complain. Oh, Mrs Fulton (Barbara Mullen) scolds the convicts – scenes where an older woman scolds men was a recurring motif in Ealing movies shot in Australia (there’s one in The Overlanders, Eureka Stockade and Bitter Springs).
There is also the issue of casting. Aldo Ray’s casting as Matt Kirk copped a lot of criticism, and it is odd to see him as an Australian resident, but he at least at looks like an ex con who might be willing to blow up a city. And being an American in Australia could have been made to work if they’d just bothered to explain it. Far more damaging is that no other leading character in the film is Australian. We get why Ealing wanted to import a star. But we struggle to understand why they imported so many non-famous non-Australian actors to play Australian residents, especially at a time when London was teeming with antipodean talent.
Canadian actor Neil McCallum plays Matt Kirk’s brother Johnny (a dreadful performance, not helped by him wearing an absurd white scarf through the whole movie); Carlo Justini is the Italian, Luke; Victor Maddern is the British Bert; the Fulton family are British (Mullen, Sears) or Irish (Gerry Duggan made his film debut as Mr Fulton); the main police officer, Hanna (Alan Tilvern) is British acting as if he’s American. There are Aussies in the mix like Grant Taylor and Kenneth Warren (both of whom would’ve made ideal convicts, incidentally) but they are a minority.
It’s remarkable that a studio which historically prided itself on authenticity as much as Ealing took such an inauthentic approach to casting. We can only hypothesise that Harry Watt and the studio were so terrified of making an overly parochial movie and scaring off American audiences that they instead decided to go full United Nations and came up with this weird grab bag.
The Siege of Pinchgut should have been a slam dunk. All Harry Watt needed to do was follow the template established by countless “family held hostage by escaping convicts” movies and ground it in as much reality as he could. But he didn’t. We interviewed Jon Cleary years ago and he claimed Watt lost enthusiasm for the film when, shortly before production, Ealing was taken over by Associated British, who eventually told the studio that they no longer wished to support its producing program; Pinchgut turned out to be the last movie made by Ealing. Cleary felt “there was no urgency in” The Siege of Pinchgut “because Harry wasn’t interested. And I think that crept through to everyone else.” Possibly, Harry Watt wasn’t interested but the lack of tension in the film is primarily due to the script, and Cleary has to take some of the blame for that (although the buck stops with Watt and Michael Balcon).
Interestingly, the original cut of The Overlanders was, from all accounts, quite lethargic and had to be jazzed up by re-editing and additional shooting supervised by Leslie Norman in England (that opening sequence of a farmer destroying their property so that the Japanese won’t get it was done in London). More extensive post-production on The Siege of Pinchgut might have really helped the film – such as scenes which, say, displayed Bert and Matt being more unhinged, having someone threaten Ann, having the convicts kill a police officer and set off an explosion. But that wasn’t going to happen at a studio that was being shut down, especially on a film that had been quite expensive to make in the first place.
The Siege of Pinchgut did poorly at the box office on its release, and Watt retired from filmmaking not long afterwards. The movie did launch the film career of Gerry Duggan, who went on to play scores of roles in Britain and Australia, notably as James Bond’s caddy in Goldfinger. We should also add that while this is a negative article, there’s lots of good things about Pinchgut – (some of) the acting, the stunning photography, several memorable scenes. It’s just a frustrating film to watch because it could have been amazing – a better script and casting, and Pinchgut would be up there with something like Seven Days to Noon (1950).
In the 1970s, Brian Trenchard Smith, coming off the success of The Man from Hong Kong, had the idea of updating the concept of Pinchgut. He developed a film called The Siege of Sydney, based on a script by Michael Cove, about disillusioned CIA operatives who seize control of Fort Denison and threaten to blow up Sydney; he wanted to cast Cleavon Little and Jack Thompson (as a sexy premier based on Neville Wran). Unfortunately, the financier pulled out after the box office failure of terrorist movie, Black Sunday (for more information read Trenchard-Smith’s delightful memoir, Adventures in the B Trade). Siege of Sydney has to be one of the greatest unmade Australian movies of all time – it would have beat The Rock (1996) to the punch by twenty years. Because that’s what The Rock was – The Siege of Pinchgut set on Alcatraz, only written and cast correctly.
And you know something? Fort Denison is still there. Still one of the best film locations in history. Still susceptible to be taken over by cinematic terrorists. We hope one day some enterprising filmmaker does The Siege of Pinchgut and does it right.
