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The Chauvel Award 2004

An extract from Bruce Malloy's essay on Charles Chauvel and the coverted award named in his honour.

Art, it is often argued, consists of imparting universal truths through particular artefacts. During his long and productive career as a director of feature films and, later, television documentaries, Charles Chauvel repeatedly demonstrated his ability to find the universal truths enshrined in the stories he brought to the screen: tales of love, self sacrifice, and the triumph of endurance over adversity. These universal truths were inevitably rooted, as the best stories always are, in the local and the regional, and embodied in characters who, although essentially ordinary people, were able to achieve the extraordinary. Chauvel's eye for detail and for evocative landscape was unfailing, and the visuality of his films is their greatest strength. In contemporary Australian cinema there are few who rival Chauvel's visionary scope.

Think, for instance, of Chauvel's use of landscape as the implacable obstacle to the pioneering ambitions of the O'Riordan family in Sons of Matthew (1949) as the brothers endeavour to carve a productive enterprise out of the virgin forests of the southern Queensland plateaus. Or consider the colourful and variegated terrain of the Northern Territory, against which the epic tragedy of Jedda (1955) unfolds. Remember that these films were shot on locations that had never before been presented to film audiences, often in the face of difficulties equally as challenging as those faced by his protagonists.

Although Chauvel has often been described as a quintessential action director—quite rightly when one remembers the charge sequence in Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940), or the climactic battle scene between the warring Aboriginal tribes in Uncivilised (1936)—Chauvel, in conjunction with his wife Elsa, herself an actor, co-producer, and scriptwriter, showed himself well able to direct actors. His casting of the unknown Errol Flynn as Fletcher Christian in In the Wake of the Bounty (1933) is legendary. Furthermore, he was able to give Chips Rafferty the opportunity to develop his persona of the Australian bushman-turned-soldier in Forty Thousand Horsemen and to refine it in Rats of Tobruk (1944) four years later—parts that would make Rafferty the most famous Australian film actor of his generation.

While Chauvel's eye for acting talent was keen, it was not always discriminating. Selecting Dennis Hoey as the white king of the lost Aboriginal tribe in the melodrama Uncivilised based on his performances as the obtuse Inspector Lestrade in the British Sherlock Holmes movies was a major miscasting. Counterbalancing the overblown performance of Dennis Hoey, however, were some gems. In Jedda he was able to extract sensitive and nuanced performances from his untutored and inexperienced principals, Robert Tudawali and Ngarla Kunoth. In Rats of Tobruk he cast the young Peter Finch, who was then at the height of his Shakespearean powers on stage and whose St. Crispin's Day cameo from Henry V is a highlight of that film. Another classic example of Chauvel casting is the raw power that Michael Pate brings to the character Shane in Sons of Matthew as he competes for the love of Cathy MacAllister (played by Wendy Gibb) with his brother Barney (played by Ken Wayne).

It is, of course, as easy to criticise some of the performances that occur in Chauvel's films as it is to disparage some of the flabby dialogue that they occasionally contain. But this criticism needs to be tempered by an awareness of the lack of a developed film industry in Australia at that time. Many of Chauvel's actors were experienced, or were even famous radio actors, which may explain the declamatory style of delivery they occasionally display.

Similarly, the scriptwriters of the day were often radio writers, for this was a time when Australian radio drama was at its peak. One can only speculate about what the Chauvels might have achieved in film art if the writers and actors of the period had the opportunities for training and experience that exist today, or if the Chauvels had access to the wealth of talent and skill of the present generation of Australian film actors.

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