amber mae cecil and bill hunter in cop shop

 5 & 8 June 1978 

road to nhill

I borrowed this film on DVD from work, having seen it when it came out but not since, and it was overdue yesterday. Perry and I set off to return it this morning and then it started raining heavily the minute we left the house, so I thought OK, I'll watch it instead while we wait for the rain to recede. 

Apart from, as I remembered it, being a pretty great movie, it also features a lot of former Crawfords  people, such as  Lynette Curran, Monica Maughan, Lois Ramsey, Patricia Kennedy, Alwyn Kurts, Terry Norris, Bill Hunter, Tony Barry, Peter Aanensen, and Don Bridges (who was in two episodes of Special Squad so just qualifies). In fact, of the only people in this film (eg Denise Roberts) who weren't in some Crawfords show like Homicide or The Box or both, it's probably because they were/are too young. I don't think that's so much a matter of the casting being drawn from a bunch of old Crawfordsites as it is a sign of what constituted an experienced senior actor in the late 1990s. The Sunday Age's review (from 16 November 1997 p. 36) described the cast as 'perhaps the finest collection of character actors ever assembled for an Australian film'. 

Alison Tilson told the Sydney Morning Herald's Ruth Hessey in 1997 that she wrote the film so her father could enjoy something at the movies without the word 'fuck' in it.* 

For some absurd reason I recalled Road to Nhill as being set in Nhill. Why on earth would it be, given the title? It's set in Pyramid Hill, a place which actually is not even very proximate to Nhill (262 km) and which has no special road leading to it, despite the discussion early in the piece of the difference between the 'road which actually goes to Nhill' and 'Nhill Road'. 

This seems like a distortion of the truth but there you go. I guess someone just thought 'Nhill' was a decent name for a nowhere place. 

Here's the Pyramid Hill store from the film, above, and google earth, below. 

Thought you might like to see a drawing of it in 1933 from the Age (14 Feb p. 12). It was built after the previous building was destroyed in a fire in 1932. The accompanying article says the new building has been 'treated in the Florentine manner'. 

Anyway, back to the film. It is not quite a film about nothing; it's about how a car accident (not actually a mundane incident, but not immediately fatal for anyone) exposes the strengths and weaknesses of a whole lot of relationships. Also, Alwyn Kurts gets to utter lines like 'I'm skipper of B grade' in a Wes Andersonian tableau. 

On the whole, as glib as it may read, just a really nice but not insubstantial film with some truly spectacular actors, a great script and marvellous locations.

There is a narratorless 'making of' documentary with the DVD that tbh doesn't add a lot to the whole. A lot of material about the making of the four-bowling-ladies-upside-down-in-the-car sequence. Matthew Dyktynski refers to the older actors as 'icons of Australian product'. There is a clip from Homicide in there, when they canvass the various tv shows they've all been in. Terry Norris is featured heavily in the 'making of' but Alwyn doesn't feature and neither does Bill H. 

*Ruth Hessey 'Women 1 Men Nhill' Sydney Morning Herald 14 November 1997 p. 66

it's garry shandling's show season 4

Fifteen and a half years ago I wrote about how much I enjoyed It's Garry Shandling's Show and, well, Shandling in particular. Since that time I have also droned on about how hard it was to watch it in Australia and how great it was to get all episodes on DVD ten or so years ago but how ironic it was that having them all didn't mean I watched them all. Well, lately I have dipped in to the box set and particularly the fourth and final season. It's an interesting season because it features a major change: Garry is joined by a girlfriend, Phoebe played by Jessica Harper, who becomes his wife during that season as well. Garry also dies - close to the final episode but then is resurrected somehow in an awkward last couple of episodes (according to the commentary there was also an actual final episode filmed which was never properly completed, and instead the final episode is a parody of Driving Miss Daisy which to be honest didn't do much for me because I haven't seen the original; it has a farewell awkwardly tacked on to the very end). 

It's interesting to hear the commentary on the 4th season episodes from various people who worked on the show (and GS himself) where it's revealed that they thought the 4th season was a dud and that the introduction of Phoebe was a mistake, etc. I think they're completely wrong - to me, Jessica Harper absolutely holds her own with Garry and some of their scenes together (and the few moments when she is on screen by herself or with people other than GS) show her to be a great comedy talent. Listening to those Hollywood guys diminish various elements of the shows and the actors (whose names they sometimes don't recall) makes me like them less and the shows more. 

It's also noted in the commentary, and this is self-evident when you watch the show, that a lot of the people who worked on IGSS went on to work on, or somehow have an impact on, The Simpsons and really changed the way that people saw comedy/parody in the late 20th century. You can see some of that stuff being worked out on IGSS. 

So then I started watching a few episodes of season 3 and I'm like - what is this!!! Although there is a great episode where Pete is in a bad mood with everyone and Garry sneaks into his house and puts a dream hat on his head and sees that he's dreaming he wishes he was a lawyer and not a shoe salesman. That's a cool. But then there's also a purported live episode covering the Bush-Dukakis election which is just depressing and weird... 

Very weird too that Barbara Cason, who plays Garry's mother, died a few months after the show ended. She died of a heart attack, but maybe the weird thing for me is I think she was in her sixties and really just didn't look that old. That happens to me a lot. Laura and I watched Maybe This Time, a film written by Anne Brooksbank and Bob Ellis and starring Judy Morris, Bill Hunter, Mike Preston and about forty other people who were once in Homicide (including Leonard Teale as some kind of Jim Cairns figure) the other night and Jill Perryman is in it, as Judy Morris' mother, bemoaning being 53 and I'm just somewhere in my mind really confused about whether that's old or not, though of course since the whole film revolves around Judy Morris being perplexed about turning 30, her mother is likely to be somewhere around that age and clearly since we're on some level meant to identify with Judy Morris' character and her thirtyness, we're meant to regard someone 23 years older than 30 as old. 

But I'm 57 and the older I get the less I am able to understand what particular ages are supposed to 'mean', whereas when I was 20 it was easy, if you were over 30 it was like why aren't you dead already. 

death of a soldier (1985)

Philippe Mora's Death of a Soldier stars James Coburn, Bill Hunter, Maurie Fields with Reb Brown as Eddie Leonski. I watched it this afternoon because I was doing this Parkville research and of course Leonski was at Camp Pell in Royal Park (according to the film he also committed one of his murders in Royal Park, I don't know if this so). It's on YouTube if you want to spend the time but I wouldn't advise it. 

I put this film in the same bag as Gross Misconduct, a very shitty reading of the Orr case directed by George T. Miller. I hope you saw the 'T'. They're both based on true stories and in both cases the film attempts to create sympathy for the central criminal. Since Gross Misconduct is a fictionalised version of the story to the degree that everyone's names are changed etc, perhaps I shouldn't be making the comparison.

Anyway, Death of a Soldier tries to make the case that Leonski had a specific condition that meant he was not responsible for his actions, and that his execution by the US army was politically motivated. Whatever, that may be true, but in making a big deal out of this possibility - particularly via the title - the film really wants us to forget that three women died as well as Leonski. Curiously, the film also makes no attempt to turn Leonski into any kind of an appealing character - I mean, sure, hollering and screaming and grabbing women in the street is not per se a hanging offence, but he's basically a jerk. We get precisely no back story on the man at all except at the end where there's some kind of eugenicist explanation for why he likes to kill. 

Frank Thring plays 'Religious Speaker'. He has about one line, but it's always a pleasure to see him. 
 

Quite a few Homicide peeps in this too, like Ron Pinnell and er, um... well, Bill Hunter, obvs. Oh, and Maurie Fields.