Ned Lander’s Molly (1983) was a journey. I went from begrudgingly liking Molly, to wanting to begrudgingly like Molly, to begrudgingly watching Molly and actively wanting it to end over the course of its short but at times ceaseless 90-minute runtime.
Not to be confused with the Samuel Johnson-starring miniseries of the same name about Australian pop commentator Molly Meldrum, Lander’s Molly instead focuses on the titular singing dog who befriends Maxine (Claudia Karvan, age circa 10-11, in her film debut), a young girl who recently lost her mother. Molly’s particular set of skills attract the nefarious, Svengalian intentions of Jones (Garry McDonald), a disgruntled former-entertainer-turned-cook who dognaps Molly with aspirations of reviving his own thwarted career.
The above description paints Molly as an amiable goofy family film, and at times it is. Going into Molly, there are multiple component parts I like: I like dogs, singing or otherwise; I like Claudia Karvan across the breadth of her impressive career (including High Tide, The Big Steal, Dating the Enemy, and 33 Postcards); I like Garry McDonald in some roles, particularly alongside his Mother and Son sparring partner Ruth Cracknell, who also appears in Molly (that show would debut on ABC the following year); and I like the early 80s Sydney milieu in which much of the film takes place.
There
are some films whose pleasurable component parts flesh out and/or carry the flimsiest of
bones. Molly has the odd distinction of being similarly threadbare and
bloated, with drawn-out, meandering shot lengths and, in the film’s second
half, interminable circus scenes after Maxine and Molly befriend a group of
acrobats. When Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth debuted in 1952,
its excesses were forgivable given their novelty. Despite the talent of the
performers and, I suppose, their novelty in the burgeoning Australian cinema of the time, to my impatient modern eyes these sequences arrest Molly dead.
Still, the dog's indisputably a star.
Ben