In order to recommend a film I'm sure most of you probably haven't seen, I need to tell you about a film I'm certain you've never seen.
The first time I ever visited a movie set was during the making of “The Canadians”. I was around ten at the time and one night my dad brought home an old friend for dinner. His name was Scott Peters, a Regina radio personality who’d gone to Hollywood years earlier to make his fortune as an actor. Scott hadn’t become famous, but he’d worked steadily. His credits included bit parts on “Invasion of the Saucer Men”, “Suicide Battalion” and “Hot Rod Gang”. But he’d also guested on “Gunsmoke” and “Wyatt Earp” which made him a huge star to my Western obsessed brother and I.
Scott was on location in Southern Saskatchewan shooting a feature entitled “The Canadians”, a Western starring Robert Ryan, John Dehner and Opera diva Teresa Stratas. It told the story of a brave Canadian Mountie (Ryan) who has to keep peace with the Sioux Nation who have crossed into Canada to escape the American army after massacring General Custer and the 7th Cavalry at the Little Big Horn. He promises Chief Sitting Bull that his people are welcome to stay in Canada as long as they don’t cause any trouble.
And you thought the Americans disliking our Border and Immigration policies was a recent thing…
Anyway, Sitting Bull agrees until an evil American Rancher (Dehner) crosses the border with some of his henchmen (Peters, Jack Creeley, etc) to retrieve horses he claims the Indians have stolen from him, killing several in a raid and also “rescuing” a white woman (Stratas) who has been living with the Sioux. Dehner and his crew make a run for the border with their stolen horses and Opera star, with a Sioux War Party in hot pursuit. Ryan, backed by only a small handful of Mounties must somehow capture the baddies to prevent a Sioux uprising.
If there’s a 1950’s Western movie cliché the film’s writer/director, Burt Kennedy, left out of his script, let me know.
After dinner, Scott invited us to visit the set the following Saturday and we drove deep into the Cyprus Hills to the remote prairie location. My brother and I brought along our six-shooters just in case.
On the day we attended, the company was shooting a number of riding sequences and “walk-and-talks” on horseback filmed from the back of a pick-up truck driving alongside the actors. Robert Ryan and British Character actor Torin Thatcher (“Great Expectations”) were decked out in NWMP scarlet and fur caps along with ingenue Burt Metcalf. Metcalf, one of the leads in the recently released “Gidget”, had a nearby gaggle of admiring farm kids who’d borrowed their parents’ big-finned Chrysler convertible to visit and look all-Hollywood at the same time.
Scott introduced us to everybody and found us places near the cameras to watch as Kennedy burned through half a dozen pages of script during the sunny cloudless afternoon. I had no idea how a film set worked, but was acutely aware of how all these people seemed to know what they were doing and got along without a lot of yelling for “Quiet”, keeping people out of other people’s eye-lines, or breaking to discuss visual styles and motivation.
I remember my mom and dad sitting on the hood of our car having coffee from a Thermos with Ryan and my mother helping the make-up lady remove something that had blown in Teresa Stratas’ eye. John Dehner took my brother and I aside with his own six-shooter to teach us a funny quick draw routine I can still do to this day. Meanwhile, Metcalf and Thatcher graciously signed 8x10 glossies for the teens in the Chrysler.
We stayed until nightfall to watch a campfire scene and then my brother and I were trooped around to shake hands and thank everybody before we left. I watched the crew wrapping cable under a single work light burning in the prairie night as we drove away, not imagining for a moment that I would spend much of my future life on film sets, nor even wanting to. It had been a fun day with some really nice people and that was that.
The movie came out a year or so later and wasn’t a hit but turned up at drive-ins and on TV with some regularity. I couple of years ago, I found a copy on eBay, stunned at how forgettable it was, but still enjoying its simple “not trying to be anything more than entertaining” approach.
Everybody involved went on to better things. Kennedy wrote and directed some fine Westerns like “Support Your Local Sheriff!”, “Dirty Dingus Magee”, John Wayne’s “The Train Robbers” and Clint Eastwood’s epic “White Hunter, Black Heart”. Robert Ryan made an even greater name for himself in “The Professionals”, “The Dirty Dozen” and “The Wild Bunch”, dying in 1973 just prior to the release of his stunning, award winning performance in “The Iceman Cometh”.
For trivia buffs, after his death, his apartment in New York’s The Dakota was sold to John Lennon.
Dehner and Thatcher never stopped working, their talents as actors and familiar faces keeping them continually in demand. Teresa Stratas went on to sing at the Met, La Scala and opera houses around the world. Most of her movie work was in filmed operas, although she returned to Canada for one final film role in Stefan Scaini’s beautiful “Under the Piano” before retiring.
Scott Peters? Well, he went back to Hollywood to find work in “Panic in Year Zero”, “The Girl Hunters” and “They Saved Hitler’s Brain”.
Okay, so I told you that story so I could tell you this one…
Last week I picked up a DVD copy of Baz Luhrmann’s “Australia”. Meant to catch it in a theatre but didn’t get the chance. Most of the local reviews were middlin’ although it’s been a huge hit Down Under, pulling more than $44 Million at the local Box office, putting it just ahead of “Babe” and Just behind “Crocodile Dundee” as the country’s All-time Box Office Champion.
Like “The Canadians”, “Australia” isn’t a great movie. But, my God, is it ever fun to watch! I had been intrigued by a print ad I’d seen on its release, wherein the critic for TIME Magazine was quoted as finding it “Shamelessly Entertaining” or “Damnably Entertaining” as the review reads online. And I remember thinking, ‘When did entertaining someone become shameful?’.
Still the moniker is aptly earned. “Australia” stars two home-grown and internationally certifiable movie stars in Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman. The story, a Harlequin Romance novel of a plot, is an Australian Western that also includes Aboriginal Magic realism and World War II. Everything in it is larger than life, from the characters and sets and epic sequences to almost every line of dialogue. And it’s shot in that incredibly enthusiastic and inimitably sprawling, Baz Luhrmann, “No, he’s not really trying to get away with this” style.
What’s most visible on the screen in “Australia” is a sheer love of what’s transpiring at any given moment. I don’t know if that’s love of country or love of movie-making or the simple joy of being alive in a certain place and time. But it is an infectious, thoroughly enjoyable couple of hours.
Please, please, please go and rent or buy “Australia” at your earliest opportunity. It will restore your faith in Mankind, film-making and just how much fun you can have watching flickering lights on a screen. If “Australia” ever turns up in an Imax theatre, I’ll be the guy who has taken up permanent residence in the front row.
It’s shamelessly entertaining on every imaginable level and I’m fairly confident you will never see another film like it.
And I told you both those stories to ask you this – can you conceive of anyone making a film called “Canada” that told our country’s story with the same love and epic sweep?
Unfortunately, I don’t. And it’s not just the financing and political complications. Do you leave out the Battle of the Plains of Abraham because it might be too dangerous to restage? Do you not bring in our own Aboriginal peoples because somebody needs you to remind the audience of their overdue redresses? Can you even shoot it in one part of the country without putting some other province’s nose out of joint?
I was talking about this and the general state of the Canadian film and television business over dinner with a writer friend last night. She agreed that a film called “Canada” was a remote possibility at best and had a fairly acute explanation for most of our current film and TV ills and even why we don’t make much that people find remotely entertaining.
“The people in our business are snobs.”
I think she’s right.
Can you imagine a Canadian film earning $44 Million in its own country, even though our population is about double that of Australia? How many films do we make that don’t feel “required” on some level to be dour, address social issues or otherwise be “important”? How much of what we do is made by people whose work is on a level that will never see it get much wider release than film festivals? How many of our artists are “pre-vetted” as another writer friend puts it, and therefore “pre-approved" merely by the film school they went to?
And how come entertainments we do realize like “Pontypool” can only find a limited release on just about the worst weekend to release a sci-fi film so it has to compete with the most anticipated sci-fi film in memory?
About 20 years after I visited the set of “The Canadians”, I wrote a film about the NWMP that was more or less a shoot ‘em up. I’d just done my first feature, which had been partly financed by the then fledgling CRTC, who seemed to like me, and had starred in a couple of other films they’d supported so I took it over there first. The guy in charge read it and liked it a lot.
But there was a problem.
“It’s a Western,” he said, “Americans make Westerns”.
I pointed out that everybody in it was a Mountie or a member of an Indian tribe. He was adamant.
“We can’t make the same kind of films the Americans do.”
I pointed out that the Italians had just made some of the most profitable Westerns of all time. Mexico and Spain made hundreds of them. Even South Africa had found international success with “The Hellions”, another Western.
Didn’t matter. It wasn’t what we did. Anymore. I guess.
What I didn’t have the brains to realize was what we weren’t making were films that (like most American films) actually entertained people; or that the long Canadian slide away from filming anything that might be even remotely entertaining had begun. It wouldn’t matter that making a film like “The Canadians” would keep Robert Ryan and Burt Kennedy working in the business until their talents could be better realized in “The Professionals” or “Dirty Dingus Magee”. It wouldn’t matter that audiences in Red Deer, Sherbrooke or St. John’s might go see a Western before spending a couple of hours enduring the Armenian genocide or raising their consciousness about homeless refugee Lesbians.
Nope. Our films had to be about something “important” and made by people who were either “reliably serious” or academically “pre-vetted”.
And I told you all of those stories to tell you this one, which I’m certain I’ve told you before.
I once had a conversation with Australian director Fred Schepisi ("The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith", "Roxanne", "The Russia House") and asked how he thought we could build an industry like Australia had. He looked at me dumbfounded and said, "Mate, we used you for the model" and then added, "What happened to you guys?"
I finally figured it out, Fred. We started to think we were important. We became snobs.
