Australasian Cinema > films > Smithy, 1946

Smithy

Smithy (Ken G. Hall, 1946)* aka Pacific Adventure (in USA) The Southern Cross (UK); prod. N P Pery, Columbia Pictures (US), although made by the Cinesound team; wr. John Chandler [Ken G. Hall], Alec Coppel, story Ken G. Hall, Max Afford, research Norman Ellison, dp George Heath; 119 mins; Ron Randell (Sir Charles Kingsford Smith), Muriel Steinbeck, John Tate , Joy Nichols, Nan Taylor, John Dunne, Alec Kellaway, John Dease, Marshall Crosby, Edward Smith, Alan Herbert, John Fleeting, Joe Valli, G. J. Montgomery-Jackson, Gundy Hill, William Morris Hughes, Captain P G Taylor and John Stannage (themselves), Charles Tingwell has one line in the opening scene, Billy Hughes appears as himself; Hall's last film; Charles Kingsford Smith docu-drama

This 'bio-pic' about the pioneering Australian aviator, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, was the last feature made by the Cinesound team. It was not, however, a Cinesound production and was initiated and entirely funded by the American company Columbia Pictures, using film hire revenue frozen in Australia by government restrictions on the export of capital.
The managing director of Columbia's Australian branch was N.P. Pery, a flamboyant American salesman who persuaded his head office in 1943 to approve the production of a film to absorb the company's rapidly accumulating capital. Since the film was intended to exploit an overseas market as well as the Australian, Pery asked Ken Hall for a film about a great Australian known outside his home country. Three were considered: Ned Kelly, Dame Nellie Melba and Kingsford Smith. Kelly was rejected because he had often been filmed before without marked commercial success, and censorship problems were still likely within Australia. Melba was also rejected because of prohibitive expenses involved in staging grand opera and in finding a singer to simulate Melba's voice.
Kingsford Smith presented fewer difficulties: with rear-projection Hall could make Smithy's plane fly across any sky, and his death while attempting to set new records was inherently more romantic than Melba's decline into old age and sickness.
Several writers were commissioned to prepare treatments, among them Jesse Lasky Jr, an American stationed at Cinesound with the US Signal Corps; Josephine O'Neill, a Sydney film critic; and the Australian playwrights Alec Coppel (later author of the British comedy The Captain's Paradise, 1952) and Max Afford, who finally shared credit with Hall himself (under his occasional pseudonym of John Chandler). Although the characterisation of Smithy owed something to Hollywood conventions of heroism, considerable effort was made by Hall to give authenticity to the background.
Smithy's old plane, the Southern Cross, was resurrected from storage and flown for the film by two of its old pilots, Captain P G Taylor and Harry Purvis. Taylor was joined in the cast by John Stannage, a former radio operator with Smithy. The most celebrated addition to the cast was a former Prime Minister of Australia, William Morris Hughes, playing himself as a younger man interviewing Smithy in London.
When finally released in June 1946 at the State Theatre, Sydney, Smithy was a major box-office success and carried strong prestige for Cinesound. It had cost £53,000, more than twice the budget of any previous Cinesound feature, and the publicity campaign to launch it was proportionately greater. Much of the publicity centred on two new local stars, Ron Randell and Muriel Steinbeck: both had acted for several years in radio, theatre and war-time propaganda films, and had appeared together in another local feature, A Son Is Born, made shortly before Smithy (although released later). Late in 1946 Randell accepted a Hollywood contract from Columbia and began his long career in American and British films. In mid-1947 Columbia released the film in England under the title The Southern Cross and at the same time in America as Pacific Adventure.
The credit that Smithy brought to Cinesound was short-lived. The company had no share of the profit made by the film and the success did nothing to re-establish the self-supporting pattern of the studio's pre-war activity, where profits from one film had helped to finance the next. It was also soon apparent that Columbia had no intention of fulfilling Pery's promises of further films.
In 1947 when Hall visited Hollywood, he met Harry Cohn, the notoriously ruthless head of Columbia. According to Hall, Cohn in no way shared Pery's enthusiasm for production away from the controls of the Hollywood head office, and Hall attributed to Cohn the severe re-editing of Smithy in the USA, as though Cohn wished to disguise the fact that the film had been made by Australians; about twenty minutes were deleted and new credits were substituted, which removed Pery's name along with any indication of the film's Australian origin, including acknowledgments to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the RAAF. Pike & Cooper: 202-203.

References and Links

Hall, Ken G. 1980, Australian Film: The Inside Story, Summit, Sydney; second edition: the first edition was entitled Directed by Ken G. Hall, 1977.

Pike, Andrew & Ross Cooper 1998, Australian Film 1900-1977: A Guide to Feature Film Production, revised edition, Oxford University Press, Melbourne.

Garry Gillard | New: 13 December, 2018 | Now: 26 December, 2018