d4 young hennessy

26 September 1973's episode of D4 was called 'Young Hennessy'. It was less worse than it might have been considering the somewhat unpromising storyline and other components (basically, Young Hennessy is an o-o-o-ld boxer who everyone thinks has a lot of money hidden somewhere in his house). The acting is stellar. There's Gus Mercurio actually playing a good guy, and get this, you really don't know if he is good, up till the end. There's Hilda Scurr, playing Mrs Hennessy and really making a meal of a role which is really not much more than a pissed-off old wife. Jeepers, even Simon Drake as a young boy called Luke isn't the terrible kind of child actor that most child actors are. Perhaps best of all - this is like a Logie contender performance, though I don't think it was one - is John Fegan as Young Hennessy. Fegan was four years out of Homicide by this stage, and while he was a compelling presence as Connolly in Homicide he wasn't exactly required to do anything more immense than deliver lines in a fairly pissed off and stern tone, a lot. Here he really puts in the time and gives such a committed performance well, I'm not sure if this is an example of good acting exactly, but... often you can't tell what he's saying. But you feel like you can. 

By the way they go to Puffing Billy including getting off at Clematis. 

big bad john - division 4 7 feb 1973

Cast-wise this is a complete classic D4 with the only D4 episode to feature Bud Tingwell and also Jackie Weaver in one of only two D4 episodes she did (she did 9 Homicides). They are father and daughter. It's a George Miller (the other George Miller) joint, or at least the external scenes are (John Jacob did the interiors).

Tingwell plays a character called 'John Smith' which is a truly terrible name for a character and really doesn't cause enough comment in the program (aside from, 'that John Smith'). The show kicks off with stock footage of Sydney Harbour because John Smith is from Sydney but if the show was an attempt to ingratiate Sydney viewers with the Crawfords Melbourne world it's very othering. Smith is a hotheaded boor who has a particular problem with hippies but in this case he's grinding the right axe because his daughter Val is mixed up with filthy scum in the form of a weasel named Hank (David Cameron).

There's some really good art in this episode, from little touches like the above to framing Cameron through the hole in a gate. 

There's also an amazing penultimate action-chase scene in Luna Park

 in which, like all the best Australian drama, the ending is not Hank being shot and falling from the top of the ghost train. Instead (SPOILER) it's Hank being caught, arrested and ready to come quietly, then being pushed off by Smith. 

By the way also this...

is 59 Glenhuntly Road Elwood. Another great example of Crawfords product placement where a business is so keen on exposure the fact that they will be depicted as happily not bothering with proper references for prospective tenants as long as they get a big enough deposit up front, is barely a consideration. 

visiting alwyn and george

Today Perry and I went to Caulfield to visit the addresses Alwyn Kurts and George Mallaby lived in in 1971. This is the Mallaby apartment - it's a ground floor flat in a quiet cul-de-sac in South Caulfield.

I assume this is the same building, though it's hard to be entirely sure. It's obviously been renovated up the wazoo if the building existed in 1970. 

This is where Alwyn Kurts lived, a rather odd looking bunch of flats in North Caulfield. His place was way up the back. 

This is one of its windows, upstairs from the laneway alongside. 

This is its door.

These are the stairs to its doors. 

This is the front of the same building. 

I don't know what to do with this so-called information but it's real. Next destination, Leonard Teale's house. 

bye margaret cruickshank

Margaret Cruickshank's last Homicide episode was 'Don't Be Lonely', aired 30 September 1975 in which she played the supine Jennifer Marriott, who, spoiler, doesn't get out alive. The gentleman is I forget his name (he has several in the episode) played by Keith Lee if I'm not mistaken. 

I think I would have a soft spot for MC even if I didn't feel a slight, very slight connection to her as I semi- partially- kind of- knew her son James for a while. His last name was actually Watson (so was hers, I suppose?) and he took the stage name to be a musician, most famously in the Cruel Sea. I was under the impression he wrote the song 'Better Get a Lawyer', which I note is actually credited to many people and I also note, my memory is shitful, but I'll tell you what I recall just to have it written down and I can comprehensively forget it. 

I was visiting mutual friends in, I'm guessing, 1992? 1993? and James turned up unannounced, with a tape of a song that he'd recorded with the Cruel Sea - in my memory it was 'Better Get a Lawyer' and he was really enthused about it. After he left we all shook our heads because we thought it was so fucking awful and tryhard. Of course it became a big hit, probably played at weddings etc.  

egan st richmond etc

It being horsemurder day today* Perry and I thought we'd head down to Richmond to check out some of the locations previously mentioned. 

Here's a useless one:

Useless mainly because the morning sun was too big and bright, but also some fool has grown trees in the way. Also, I wanted to get a picture of Perry in front of the sign that said Perry Palms but the Y has fallen off. 

So this place:

I didn't even show it to you before because I didn't know where it was but we happened upon it. It's a bridge across the Yarra in Abbotsford and the building behind is now the big Salvos op shop. Apparently at one stage it had an incinerator (or at least a chimney) on it which it no longer has. 

I think this is Sheila Florance outside this place in Egan st and...

Here it is today. Literally today. 

The other side of the road, at 2 and 4 Egan which as you can see has now been blown out of all proportion by I'm sure entirely appropriate renovations. 

& generally speaking, the street. 

We also walked around to the parallel st, Peers st, where I used to live in 1996, so I could show Perry that house, but I couldn't find it. It might even have been pulled down. There's nothing that corresponded to my memory of the house. 

* and also destined to get reasonably hot

who is erin carter, etc

 

Did you ever see the 2005 film A History of Violence starring Viggo Mortensen? Oh well I won't spoil anything in particular but I want to tell you that the beginning of that film has an extremely strong similarity to this Netflix series starring Evin Ahmad. What amazes me is that this is Ahmad's first English-speaking role (only because her English is clearly excellent, no obvious Swedish or any other non-English accent, and she is clearly a star in the making). What also amazes me is that even bog-standard backyard Barcelona is sumptuous. The series is light plotwise but everyone and everything looks good even when they are splattered with tastefully arranged blood. 

Have you seen the chronically shit 1975 film Scobie Malone? Almost everyone in this film (from Jack Thompson onwards) had appeared in Homicide at some point or another. It has classy moments like Shane Porteous wishing of a middle-aged woman that he could 'nail her tits to a wall' because she 'fries my snags'. Well, anyway, I'm watching it now and it's horrendous, not because it's Australian obvs in fact because I suspect it has the extensive overarching influence of Casey Robinson, who was producer and cowriter on the film and was trying to push it into the US market. Robinson was a US screenwriter (way back to even pre-talkies) who had retired to Australia (according to Wikipedia) but unfortunately not properly retired as he bounced back to ruin this movie. Robinson was one of the writers of Casablanca. This is a sad last hurrah for him. I'm going to suggest everyone else had the chance to redeem themselves in other films thereafter.

Admittedly I'm only 40 minutes in. Maybe it gets incredible later. 

raiders of the lost etc

 

Lacking Homicide and having gone all the way through Special Squad I am now randomly watching the shitty old films that my ill-advised subscription to various streaming services allow me. My choices are somewhat driven by the reviews I read/hear of various new iterations of old franchises so, there's a new Indiana Jones film out (I suppose it's not that new - it's like a month old) so I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I guess is one of those films I almost certainly saw when it came out - I was 16 or so, maybe I was a tad too cool but nah probably not - but I remember nothing, absolutely nothing about it, except whatever has been communicated to me via the zeitgeist. I watched this film in bits and pieces over a week or so. Ditto Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation - I watched this shizzle in instalments, barely comprehending the story or perhaps comprehending there is not much of a story, and taking in interesting bits of information along the way, like, that apparently Simon Pegg has been a regular member of the supporting cast in these films for over a decade now, I never knew. 

Anyway what I really want to see is the Barbie film but this pleasure is being denied me. I would also quite like to see the new Mission Impossible film I think. Or maybe I should wait five years. 

homicide '8mm'

First aired 18 March 1976. 

I was mainly interested in this episode because it has a McDonalds in it. As far as I recall McDonalds came to Australia in 1975 or near as damnit. So this was a very new phenomenon. 

Melbourne Age 5 April 1975 p. 28

And also, George Spartels - once again not playing a Greek or Italian but a different kind of foreigner. A New Zealander. His character name's John Smith I shit you not. 

Update 22 July: A propos of 'John Smith' I think it is the next episode - which is called 'Graveyard Shift' - where someone is mentioned as having checked into a hotel under the name 'John Smith', an atypically terrible continuity failure.

homicide - double take

An episode first shown 26 February 1976, the last year of Homicide's existence. Obviously (?) there was no such thing as the Federal Bank (the episode also has a branch of the 'Australia Bank'). I was able to figure out where this was by the 'T. J. O'Connor' on the front. There was a little bit of information on him in the press - he was a baker - it's Armstrong Street Middle Park. 

This is the building on Google Earth, it's odd to see that the T. J. O'Connor has been taken off. 

The place has been so zhouzhed up since the mid-70s. The palm tree! 

Just a close up of the entrance seconds before the bank's robbed. I wonder if this guy (who does not show up anywhere else in the episode) had people round to see his performance:

Blink and you'd miss veteran radio announcer Roly Barlee in a non-speaking part as a security guard who cops it before the opening credits. 

EG the below from the Age 24 June 1939 p. 35

Seems like Barlee didn't do any tv or film acting after Homicide but he had quite a few more up his sleeve in '76 after this one. He had a spoken part on Bruce Woodley's I Am Australian album in 1988. 

What intrigues me was that - without going into detail in a big way on the plot - the bank robbers drive around for a while and steal another car but this scene is actually outside the same building again - they just saved a bit of time by going nowhere and filming this unrelated scene in the same place. 

Here's a very early appearance by, yes, 25-year-old Jane Clifton as 'Jenny Walker' - that's the character name in the credits but I don't actually think she's mentioned by name in the actual show. She's a feisty one.  (Seen here with Bowen Llewelyn as William Young, one of the bank robbers).*

She gets away in part through her own bravery, it's a good character. This wouldn't always have been the case in Homicide where a lot of mouthy women have bitten the dust over more than a decade. With a sort of implication that they deserved it or perhaps that it wasn't a surprise when such things happened. 

* What happened to Bowen Llewelyn I wonder.