Menace, The** (Cyril J. Sharpe, 1928) prod. Percy Juchau, Juchau Productions, wr. Louise Miller (?) dp Jack Bruce; David Edelsten (doctor); man discovers his wife is a drug addict
The 'menace' is the drug traffic in Sydney. A man finds that his wife is an addict and sets out to break the ring of drug-pedlars, who include several Chinese.
Percy Juchau, a Sydney businessman, formed a film company in November 1926, employing five Australians with varied experience in Hollywood: Cyril Sharpe, who had worked there as a 'technical director', Jack Bruce, a camera technician, Al True and Eric Wilkinson, minor staff at Universal, and Louise Miller (Sharpe's wife), formerly of the Lasky studio. The only film completed was The Menace, shot late in 1926 and early in 1927 at the Sydney Showground. After directing the film, Sharpe left Juchau's employ and became managing director of Commonwealth Film Laboratories in Sydney, with Jack Bruce as his chief technician.
The film was belatedly previewed in Sydney before a trade audience on 2 February 1928, but no theatrical release followed. The Sydney Morning Herald, 3 February 1928, castigated it for its 'unhealthy sensationalism... It is not as though the drug traffic were here taken seriously as a social problem - it serves merely as a pretext for very thin and bombastic melodrama'. Pike & Cooper: 142-3.
Pike & Cooper: 142-3.
Garry Gillard | New: 5 December, 2018 | Now: 29 November, 2019