The Picture Show Man ADRIAN DANKS
MAIN CAST ‘Pop’ Pym John Meillon Palmer Rod Taylor Freddie John Ewart Larry Harold Hopkins Fitzwilliam Patrick Cargill Madame Cavalli Jelena Žigon Lucy Sally Conabere Lou Garry McDonald Miss Lockhart Judy Morris Mrs Duncan Jeanie Drynan Policeman Tony Barry Major Lockhart Don Crosby PRINCIPAL CREDITS Year of Release 1977 Length 98 minutes Director John Power Screenplay Joan Long, based on the book by Lyle Penn Production Company Limelight Productions Producer Joan Long Production Manager Sue Milliken Cinematography Geoff Burton Editor Nicholas Beauman Art Direction David Copping Costume Design Judith Dorsman Music Peter Best
AS ADRIAN DANKS’ INSIGHTFUL AND THOROUGHLY RESEARCHED ESSAY SAYS OF THE PICTURE SHOW MAN: ‘THE FILM HAS LARGELY RECEDED FROM CRITICAL ATTENTION SINCE ITS AUSTRALIAN RELEASE IN 1977.’ IT IS CLEAR FROM HIS STUDY THAT IT IS OVERDUE FOR REAPPRAISAL, ON GROUNDS BOTH TEXTUAL AND CONTEXTUAL. AS DANKS POINTS OUT, THE FILM OFFERS A PERCEPTIVE AND SYMPATHETIC ACCOUNT OF THE EARLY DAYS OF CINEMATIC EXHIBITION IN AUSTRALIA, AND HE ALSO DRAWS ATTENTION TO THE ROLE OF WOMEN FILMMAKERS IN THE RENASCENT NATIONAL CINEMA OF THE 1970S. AS ONE WHO UNDERVALUED THE FILM AT THE TIME OF ITS RELEASE, I FEEL PROPERLY CHASTENED WHEN I NOW REFLECT NOT ONLY ON SO MANY ASPECTS OF ITS AFFECTIONATE REIMAGINING OF TIMES PAST, BUT ALSO ON ITS PLACE AMONG THE LARGER CONTEXTS THAT THIS ESSAY EVOKES SO TELLINGLY.
Brian McFarlane, Series Editor
The film focuses on the interactions between Maurice ‘Pop’ Pym (John Meillon), his son Larry (Harold Hopkins) and their newly hired pianist Freddie (John Ewart), as well as the various colourful characters they encounter on their journeys including a pair of eccentric but felonious illusionists, Fitzwilliam (Patrick Cargill) and Madame Cavalli (Jelena Žigon); a sexually frustrated widow, Mrs Duncan (Jeanie Drynan); a ‘squatter’s daughter’, Lucy (Sally Conabere); and a dance instructor, Miss Lockhart (Judy Morris), enamoured with the famed Isadora Duncan. The Picture Show Man is one of only a small number of Australian films that deal directly with aspects of local and national film history, and which draw extensively on the archival research undertaken by one of its key creative personnel, writer/producer Joan Long. The film’s reputation may have suffered in comparison to the more audacious, ambitious, technically brilliant and truly seminal Newsfront (Philip Noyce), a similarly cinema history–focused, but more filmically dynamic, opus released to much fanfare the following year. The Picture Show Man does, however, deserve to be re-evaluated in relation to the writing and rewriting of Australia’s film history in the 1970s and 1980s, the much-derided ‘AFC [Australian Film Commission] genre’ or period film, the increasing importance and invaluable contribution of key female production personnel to the Australian feature-film industry, and the model and example it offers for local films attempting to attract international recognition and distribution, among various other factors.
Production and release
The film’s cast includes a number of important Australian actors of the era, including Drynan, Ewart, Hopkins, Meillon, Morris and Tony Barry; as well as several international performers somewhat-fancifully introduced to attract unlikely and only ever lukewarm overseas interest, like Cargill, known for his role in Father Dear Father, and Žigon, a Yugoslav actress. It also marks the return of one of Australia’s most successful international stars, Rod Taylor, a key motivating factor for the film’s comparatively robust, if patchy, international screening schedule and release. Much of the writing and publicity around the film centred on Taylor’s homecoming, an emphasis that seemed somewhat out of kilter with his supporting role as Palmer, the ironic decision to have him play an American partly due to his inability to re-confect an Australian accent, and the lightweight and one- or, at best, two-dimensional nature of his characterisation. Taylor’s role also brought to the surface the perennial conflict between truly local film production, distribution and exhibition and competing models imported from the United States and elsewhere.
Unlike Newsfront, which potently and melancholically documents the demise of Australian production interests in the 1940s and 1950s through the fates of rival newsreel companies, The Picture Show Man provides a markedly less nuanced and more explicitly allegorical portrait
