Outback Ethnography Revisiting Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners

Were we to shoot in America, it would emerge as a half-assed Western, with bars instead of pubs, cowboys instead of sheep drovers – they move differently, walk and react differently. Unlike in the Old West, no one carried guns in the outback. How could we reproduce the Aussie outlook on American locations?

— Fred Zinnemann¹

When the renowned Hollywood director Fred Zinnemann came to Australia to make The Sundowners (1960), it was no part of his intention to stimulate the then-moribund state of the Australian film industry. His film was an Anglo-American production for Warner Bros.; it featured Hollywood stars (Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum) in the leading roles; and its technical team was mainly British, headed by top cameraman Jack Hildyard, who had recently won an Oscar for his work on The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957). The Australian contribution was mostly confined to the supporting cast, which included (inevitably) Chips Rafferty as a sheepshearing contractor, a young John Meillon as one of the shearers and a briefly glimpsed (and uncredited) Ray Barrett in a pub scene.

Yet, when one thinks of comparable Hollywood movies set in Australia, such as Kangaroo (Lewis Milestone, 1952) and On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959), Zinnemann’s representation of the land and its people has a quite different ambience. It is odd to see the film sometimes described as a sort of American western in sheep’s clothing. Zinnemann went to some lengths to avoid giving that impression, depicting activities such as droving and sheepshearing alongside dangers ranging from a prowling dingo to a forest fire that belonged to a specifically Australian landscape. When Warner Bros., for financial reasons, wanted him to shoot the film in Arizona, he As Flaherty did in pictures like Nanook of the North (1922) and Man of Aran (1934), Zinnemann in The Sundowners was showing a community and a way of life that had never been seen before in a mainstream Hollywood movie (the film’s trailer even describes it as ‘the untold story of [a] new kind of people’ ). More than in any film he had made since his debut, Redes (co-directed with Emilio Gómez Muriel, 1936), he was using Flaherty as his touchstone. In the process, however, he was also anticipating characteristics and concerns that were to come to prominence in the Australian film revival of the following decade.