From The Hero of the Dardanelles, How We Beat the Emden and 40,000 Horsemen through to Breaker Morant and Gallipoli, Australia has a rich and proud tradition of war movies.
The genre has been overlooked in recent years, apart from the 2006 drama Kokoda, chiefly because battle scenes are expensive and beyond the reach of most producers' budgets, rather than any lack of ripping yarns.
So it's remarkable that two Australian-produced war movies are being released this year. Beneath Hill 60, the true story of the Australian miners who tunnelled beneath enemy lines on the Western Front in 1916 and triggered the biggest explosion the world had ever known, debuts this week. Tomorrow, When the War Began, the fictional story of a band of teenagers who wage a guerrilla war, based on the John Marsden novel, is due out in September. Marking the directing debut of screenwriter Stuart Beattie (Australia, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Collateral), the film stars Caitlin Stasey, Rachel Hurd-Wood and Lincoln Lewis.
“I think Australians are incredibly interested in war films,” David Roach, the writer/co-producer of Hill 60 tells SBS Film. “When we told investors we were doing a World War 1 film, the first thing they'd say is 'my grandfather or great-grandfather was there,' so there's an immediate emotional connection.”
Some of the miners hailed from Queensland, enabling the producers to tap into investors from the Townsville region. The film was initially budgeted at $4 million and local investors promised to contribute almost the full amount, until the global financial crisis struck and all but 10% of the funds evaporated. Encouraged by Screen Australia to expand the film's scale, the producers increased the budget to $9.5 million, the Queensland and NSW state agencies contributed, and Queensland investors helped fund the remaining 20%.
Roach believes the heroic story of the Australian Tunnelling Company hadn't been filmed before because the company was formed in secret; tunnelling in wartime was considered “ungentlemanly”; and a lot of the men were engineers who remained in France and Belgium after the war ended to help with rebuilding efforts.
Australia's first war drama was blatant propaganda, Will They Never Come. Released in April 1915 and directed by Alfred Rolfe, it was a half-hour saga of the romance between a girl and a 'namby-pamby' volunteer who returned as a wounded war hero. That sparked a sequel in July from the prolific Rolfe, The Hero of the Dardanelles, a feature set on the cliffs of Gallipoli (shot in Sydney's Tamarama beach) on the day the Allies landed on April 25; only about 20 percent of that film survives.
Rolfe's How We Beat the Emden launched on December 6 1915, centring on a young naval cadet who tells his mates about the legendary battle between HMAS Sydney and the German battleship Emden, Australia's first naval victory. Another propaganda effort was The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell, a romanticised account of a nurse who was executed after helping British soldiers.
Director George Willoughby's The Joan of Arc of Loos was based on the heroism of a French peasant girl who inspired the Allies after seeing a vision of an angel during the otherwise disastrous Battle of Loos in 1915. The provocatively entitled If the Huns Came to Melbourne flopped despite extensive advertising which echoed the extreme language that Prime Minister Billy Hughes was using to try to whip up support for conscription.
Charles Chauvel's epic 40,000 Horsemen (1940) chronicled the heroism of the Australian Light Horse regiment in Palestine during WWII, and introduced a young Chips Rafferty as an Aussie trooper who gets to romance a French mademoiselle (Betty Bryant) before the spectacular climactic cavalry charge.
Set in South Africa's Boer War in 1901, Bruce Beresford's Breaker Morant (1980) focused on three Australian soldiers tried by a British military court for the murder of 12 prisoners and a German missionary. It starred Edward Woodward, Bryan Brown, Lewis Fitz-Gerald and Jack Thompson. Beresford shot the film in 36 days in South Australia, its $700,000 budget fully funded by the SA Film Corp. He was given a script by David Stevens and Jonathan Hardy but rejected it as “hopelessly under-researched,” and wrote his own, inspired by Ken Ross's play which dwelt on the trial. Stevens and Hardy, whom the director never met, received credits as stipulated by their deal with the SAFC, and all three shared in the Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay,
The SAFC's then boss John Morris didn't much care for the movie, Beresford recalls, and it was only a chance encounter he had with Cannes festival scout Pierre Rissient at an Australian Film Commission cocktail party in Sydney that led to the film screening in official competition in Cannes.
Peter Weir's Gallipoli (1981) followed drifter Frank Dunne (Mel Gibson) and grazier's son Archy Hamilton (Mark Lee) as they meet in an outback foot race, become best mates and, after training in Egypt, land at Gallipoli. “It was a huge hit in Australia, but British historians took it to task for factual inaccuracies and alleged bias against the British commanders of the campaign,” observed Paul Byrnes in his notes on the film in Australian Screen.
Beresford's Paradise Road (1997) looked at a group of women imprisoned in Sumatra during World War 2, who form a choir. It was based on a true story, which Beresford scripted after tracking down survivors in Australia, the US, England and Holland. The ensemble cast included Glenn Close, Frances McDormand, Pauline Collins and Julianna Margulies. Beresford had a tough time convincing 20th Century Fox, which put up most of the $14 million budget, to approve his choice of a then unknown Cate Blanchett to play Australian nurse Susan McCarthy. “The studio wanted Minnie Driver but I dug my heels in,” he told SBS Film. “It was a nightmare.” To Beresford's amazement, Fox refused to list Cate's name in the credits on the DVD sleeve.
Despite his best efforts, “the film did terribly badly,” he reflects ruefully. “It needed critical support and didn't get it.
