Film

Essentially a creative critical biography, The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck belongs to a greater project of re-examining Hollywood and decentring the phallocentrism of film history. It is the latest book in the series Women’s Media History Now! which focuses on the unexplored work of women in film. Established in 2009, this series became even more timely with the advent of #MeToo and with books such as Helen O’Hara’s call to arms, Women vs Hollywood (2021). The purpose of this new women’s media history is, according to Catherine Russell, to seek out its ‘absent’ or ‘lost’ women protagonists. Barbara Stanwyck (1907–90) may be neither absent nor lost. Indeed, as Russell admits, there is a wealth of material on Stanwyck, including monographs, biographies, and entire archives dedicated to her, and her films are still shown regularly in cinemas, on digital platforms, and on free-to-air television. Nonetheless, Russell argues that Stanwyck has been undervalued as a creative force in the films she helped make memorable. Hence the curious title of the book, which seems more suited to the study of a director than an actress. Russell sets out to show how Stanwyck ‘made’ films by making herself a master of her craft.

A confession: I was a child actor. Never a child star, although certainly that was the intention. For years I endured the three-hour drive from Canberra to Sydney, preparing for my five-minute meeting with some Surry Hills casting director, whose first question would inevitably be ‘How’s your American accent?’ The zenith of my career was a thirty-second commercial for the orange-flavoured soft drink Mirinda, a merchandising tie-in with the release of Spider-Man 2, shot at Fox Studios on a full-sized replica of a New York subway carriage. On the soundstage next door, Baz Luhrmann was directing Nicole Kidman in their famously extravagant campaign for Chanel No. 5. There we all were: Australians in Australia, pretending to be Americans for America. Even at that early age, I sensed that Australian cinema existed in the long shadow of Hollywood, and that there has always been, as Sam Twyford-Moore expertly describes in his new book, ‘some kind of psychic gangway between Sydney and Los Angeles’. 

'Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven.’ William Wordsworth was writing about the French Revolution, but the sentiment could have applied to the three McDonagh sisters in 1920s Sydney. Isabel (born in 1899), Phyllis (1900), and Paulette (1901) were the beneficiaries of two intertwined revolutions – modernism and feminism – that encouraged them to develop skills outside the domestic sphere and to become experts in their field. Daringly, they chose filmmaking, the great obsession of the period; and they were very good at it.

If the past is a foreign country, Hollywood is another planet: they sure do things differently there. Just how differently is the predictable and tedious obsession of far too much adaptation scholarship, fixated on the degree of fidelity of a film to its adapted literary Urtext. This practice, boring and unimaginative, diverts the attention from what art can tell us about ourselves to what it can tell us about the colour of the breeches worn in the novel by that odd fellow in the twelfth chapter. Thomas Leitch, for one, is sick of it, and he has set out to shake up film scholarship and inject new life into the study of adaptation in this wide-ranging and acutely observed treatment.

Possibly inspired by the British Film Institute’s ‘Classics’ texts, the ‘Australian Screen Classics’ series is not only downright valuable but also looks good. The latest two, in their smart black covers, each adorned with a striking still from the relevant film, confirms the importance of having such detailed attention paid to key films in our history.

It is no easy task for an outsider to anatomise a national cinema, and the Austrian academic Adi Wimmer suggests in this series of essays that Australian cinema has always been more national than most. In other words, our filmmakers have been unusually dedicated to the project of defining a collective identity through a set of instantly recognisable myths: the ultimate Australian film would be one that showed a group of sun-bronzed, laconic, Anglo-Saxon blokes battling droughts and big business in a wide brown land seen equally as a symbol of brooding masculinity and as a hostile mother.

The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand is the thirteenth of Wallflower Press’s ‘24 frames’ series, but there is no need for the editors to feel superstitious on that account. This is a series which presents certain problems. It requires the editor(s) of each volume to choose twenty-four films that are, in some degree, representative of the titular country, or, as the case sometimes even more dauntingly is, of two titular countries – and I know whereof I speak. Having edited Wallflower’s The Cinema of Britain and Ireland (2005), I can sympathise with the difficulties involved in trying to achieve any sort of representativeness across not one but two film-making countries. And I might add resentfully that Canada gets a whole volume to itself. Canada!

Like many students of Australian film, I became aware of Cecil Holmes’s work through the viewing of a scratched print of Three in One in a lecture hall in one of our tertiary institutions, many years after it had failed to gain general release within Australia and killed off the dream of an indigenous film industry, yet again. A brave and naïve film, it was clearly well-made, stylish, and addressed a local audience without condescension or parochialism. Three in One was an early hint of what an Australian cinema might look like, and is now held to be one of the landmarks in the history of Australian film. To those who see the film now, though, its maker must seem to have suffered the same fate as its optimistically named production company, New Dawn Films. There is some satisfaction, then, in reading One Man’s Way to see what did happen to a substantial talent squandered by an insecure and conservative Australian film industry.