Published 2017 on Down Under Flix
Sport has long occupied a key place in Australian culture. As noted by Daryl Adair in his essay ‘Making sense of Australian sport history’, the earliest British migrants used sport to maintain links with their country of origin, while subsequent generations helped forge a national identity on the world stage via their sporting prowess. Adair also notes that Australia’s coasts and surf culture have facilitated an array of water-based sports, and in recent years the AFL, among others, has contributed to the reconciliation agenda as a prominent employer of Indigenous athletes. In light of this national pastime, this week Down Under Flix spotlights three sports-centric films from the late 1970s and early 80s.
Dawn
Director: Ken Hannam
Stars: Bronwyn Mackay-Payne, Ron Haddrick, Bunney Brooke, Tom
Richards, John Diedrich
Dawn! is a biopic of Dawn
Fraser, the celebrated Australian swimmer and Olympian. The film’s opening
credits are accompanied by a montage chronicling Fraser’s achievements in the pool,
before cutting to Fraser in the late 1960s making ends meet delivering
groceries. From here, Dawn!shifts
back in time and traces Fraser’s journey from rags to riches to quasi-rags: her
freestyle victories at the 1956, 1960, and 1964 Olympics in Melbourne, Rome,
and Tokyo; her rebellious behaviour that eventually gets her banned from
competing professionally; and her romances and other trials and tragedies along
the way.
Ken
Hannam’s film of Fraser’s life isn’t the first biopic covered on Down Under Flix
(see Paradise Found), nor the first sports
biopic (see The Cup), nor the first water sports
biopic (see Swimming Upstream). While it shares those films’ formulaic narrativizing of real
life events and occasional tendency towards hagiography, Dawn! has more in common
with other films of its vintage (the Australian New Wave era) depicting the
not-too-distant past, i.e. flicks like Caddie and Newsfront and The Picture Show Man that were
period-set, working-class, somewhat nostalgic, and chirpily downbeat. Hannam
directed one of these very films, Sunday
Too Far Away, a few years before Dawn!, but after the biopic’s disappointing reception
would subsequently specialise in television, including a first-rate TV
adaptation of Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery
Under Arms featuring Sam Neill, Steven Vidler, Beyond Innocence’s Keith Smith and recent
Down Under Flix interviewee Graham Caldwell. Writer and producer Joy
Cavill, meanwhile, previously helmed a documentary about Fraser and wrote and
produced episodes of Skippy,
starring that other Australian icon.
At
the film’s centre is Bronwyn Mackay-Payne as Fraser. Dawn! was both
Mackay-Payne’s film debut and swansong, and though her performance
was somewhat maligned critically I quite liked her work here.
Mackay-Payne’s performance is at times mannered, betraying her status as a
novice actor, but there are shades of Jodie Foster and Claudia Karvan in her
performance—neither of whom are slouches—and she anchors Fraser’s journey from
surly teenager to self-possessed young woman and larrikin icon to vulnerable
former champion and embodies her often contradictory qualities. In light of
recent media surrounding the challenges faced by former Olympians and swimming
champions—such as Ian Thorpe hiding his homosexuality until just a few years
ago, or Grant Hackett’s recent and widely publicised personal struggles—Dawn!’s thoughtful look at the
human being behind the icon still carries resonance…
The Club
Director: Bruce Beresford
Stars: Jack Thompson, Graham Kennedy, John Howard, Frank Wilson,
Alan Cassell
While
I generally try to program films I’m not familiar with on Down Under Flix, so I
can experience the pleasure (or its opposite) of discovery alongside many readers,
I knew I wanted to cover The
Club this week, and not just because of my professed
fascination with Bruce Beresford’s work (as noted here and here). The Club, simply put, is a lot
of fun.
Adapted
from a play by David Williamson, Beresford’s film is set in the milieu of the
Victorian Football League (VFL) of the early 1980s (though somewhat
ironically, The Club is
produced by the South Australian and New South Wales Film Corporations). Geoff
Hayward (John Howard) is Collingwood Football Club’s latest recruit, at
considerable cost to the club and some personal expense to new club president
Ted Parker (Graham Kennedy). Hayward’s hefty payday and air of superiority
stirs discontent among other players, including struggling star player Danny
Rowe (Harold Hopkins), and coach Laurie Holden (Jack Thompson). The film charts
the fallout of this latest hire along with ongoing managerial conflicts between
Holden, Parker, and club higher echelon Jock Riley (Frank Wilson) and Gerry
Cooper (Alan Cassell).
Following
closely on the heels of Breaker
Morant, The Club is
another male-dominated, masculine drama from Beresford. Fittingly for both the
subject matter and the VFL milieu, the tone of the film is muscular—established
effectively in early exercise and training scenes—and the staging of the
football games is some of the best committed to film: clearly photographed by
Donald McAlpine (a regular collaborator with Beresford), spatially and
geographically sound, and with excellent use of slow motion to highlight key
moments and, in turn, mine character and narrative beats from the gameplay.
These
scenes mark The Club as
a more ambitious undertaking, production-wise, than Beresford’s previous film
adaptation of a David Williamson play, Don’s
Party (set largely in one location at a house party on
election night in 1969), and the film feels much less stagey than that 1976
adaptation. Even so, like its predecessor, the film’s core and real fireworks
reside in those theatrical, dialogue-propelled scenes where comedy and
interpersonal drama and politics (whether national or strictly VFL) collide.
Williamson is Australia’s most famous playwright, and found a fan in two-time
adapter Beresford: in his published journals the director writes “I don’t think
I’ve ever seen a play of his I didn’t think was extremely good. I am
continually astonished at the range of subject matter—friendships, love affairs,
business, law, sports, politics—and the insight, humour and depth with which
every topic is handled” (Josh
Hartnett definitely wants to do this… True stories from a life in the screen
trade, p. 113). Beresford expresses admiration for Williamson’s
breadth of subject matter, but much the same could be said of his own diverse,
at times eclectic filmography.
Moreover,
where Williamson frequently gives actors some of their best dialogue, Beresford
frequently directs some of their best work, and The Club is no exception.
Jack Thompson is in commanding form with a mighty moustache that would make
latter-day Kurt Russell blush; TV icon Graham Kennedy—a Williamson veteran
from Don’s Party and
later to appear in another film of his plays, Travelling North—gives a fine
tragicomic performance; a young and trim John Howard plays defiance well; and
Alan Cassell makes for a slippery, velvety Machiavel. But the standout is Frank
Wilson as the blowhard Jock Riley, a jovial bully who deserves every inch of
his comeuppance.
The Coolangatta Gold
Director: Igor Auzins
Stars: Joss McWilliam, Colin Friels, Nick Tate, Robyn Nevin,
Josephine Smulders
If Dawn! is symptomatic of
the nostalgic leanings of one faction of the Australian New Wave, and The Club symptomatic of
another in its grappling with the tenets of national identity, 1984’s The Coolangatta Gold is more
emblematic of Australian films of the 1980s such as The Man Snowy River and Crocodile Dundee: brazenly
commercial, one part Hollywood, one part local tourism advert. Much the same
could be said of the Gold Coast, Queensland, which serves threefold as the
film’s backdrop, muse, and featured player.
The
film’s plot echoes that of Swimming Upstream, pitting brothers against each other for a troubled father’s
affections. Joe Lucas (Nick Tate) is a retired athlete grooming his son Adam
(Colin Friels) to follow in his footsteps and succeed where he failed. Meanwhile,
he neglects his other son Steve (Joss McWilliam), using him as a training
partner for Adam but ultimately indifferent to his needs and goals. Steve
retaliates by entering himself into the Coolangatta Gold Ironman surf
lifesaving competition, pitting himself against Adam in the contest.
The
Coolangatta Gold was the biggest-budgeted Australian production of its era.
The film was partly conceived as a showcase for the Gold Coast and built around
the novel concept of staging a real-life quadrathlon, which features in the
film and would go on to become a recurring calendar event. The event proved
more popular with audiences than the film itself, which underperformed
critically and financially, despite its extremely commercial aesthetics: the
film shares DNA with the likes of The
Karate Kid (released the same year), Flashdance and the Rocky films, and folds
sports movie, bildungsroman, family melodrama, romance, and pop music video
(several numbers are performed by Steve’s band Shark Attack, with Skyhooks’
and Hey Hey It’s Saturday’s
Wilbur Wilde on the mic) into one glossy if not quite coherent package.
Dramatically
speaking, the film is somewhat hobbled by its ending, which tries to be all
things to all people. Joe Lucas is such an unsympathetic character, and his
investment in Adam and exclusion of Steve so unlikable, that it renders
the film’s denouement, which contrives happy endings for the film’s quintet of
core characters, dramatically unsatisfying precisely because it rewards his
repellent behaviour. Actor Nick Tate fights hard against this perplexing
characterisation, but at times it’s a losing battle. Joss McWilliam also works
his butt off as Steve and satisfies the physical demands of the role, but
struggles to make some of the soapier material land. The best performances in
the film come from Colin Friels, who’s typically rock solid and brings nuance
and shading to his favoured son role, and Josephine Smulders as Steve’s
romantic interest, whose dance troupe neighbours Steve’s karate class (yes,
there’s also dance and karate in this film). Like Dawn!’s Mackay-Payne, this was
both screen debut and swansong for Smulders, and it’s a shame as she has an
easygoing, charismatic screen presence.
Whatever The Coolangatta Gold’s dramatic
shortcomings, the execution and onscreen presentation of the Ironman
competitions is very impressive: with its brightly lit, crisply shot images of
boats and bodies scaling massive, curling waves in slow motion, with the Gold
Coast’s golden sands and sleek modern architecture peppering the distant shore,
there’s a scale and thunder here that’s only occasionally summoned in
Australian films. Befitting the subject matter, there’s also something Leni
Riefenstahl/Triumph of the Will-esque
about seeing these sculpted, tanned Aryan specimens in peak physical condition
in action: even Rocky III-era
Sylvester Stallone might blush and think it’s a bit much. Speaking of Rocky, the competition and
training scenes are bolstered by the score from Bill Conti of Rocky and The Karate Kid fame. While
Conti’s melody here isn’t as memorable as his scores for those films (and nor
is the film’s protagonist quite the same innately warm underdog), the score
ties The Coolangatta Gold to
their sports corn lineage and helps manufactures some swagger. In some
respects, that sums up the film: it’s proficiently manufactured. Director Igor
Auzins (previously responsible for the very different We of the Never Never) did not
make another film after The
Coolangatta Gold, but based on the evidence could have gone on to
helm slick product on a moderate budget for the likes of Simpson and
Bruckheimer.
Ben Kooyman