1. P. P. McGuinness, “Don’s Party: an accurate portrayal of a pretty horrible sub-culture,” The National Times, December 6-11, 1976, pp. 48-49.
2. P. P. McGuinness, “A fine piece of Australian gallows humour,” The National Times, October 6-11, 1975, p. 44.
3. P. P. McGuinness, “‘Petersen’ is not son of ‘Alvin Purple’ though there is a trace,” The National Times, October 28-November 2, 1974, p. 53.
4. P. P. McGuinness, “A master of black humour talks on authoritarianism, plays and films: Williamson looks for his screenplay role,” The National Times, August 21-26, 1972, p. 20.

1.
P. P. McGuinness, “Don’s Party: an accurate portrayal of a pretty horrible sub-culture,” The National Times, December 6-11, 1976, pp. 48-49.

The major difference between Australians with a university education and a social conscience, and the rest, is that they behave a lot worse than the rest.

This seems to be the underlying thesis of all David Williamson’s writing, and is certainly demonstrated in the film of Don’s Party, which has just been released in Sydney.

This may be a little unfair, since what is being demonstrated is just that they are pretty horrible, at least as bad as the silvertails whom they denounce so viciously for their concern with status and wealth, and certainly quite typical of Australians generally; it is just that the kind of half-baked education which is offered by our academic institutions does not succeed in making people any more articulate or perceptive than they would have been left to their own devices. It just gives them meal tickets.

It is impossible to leave Don’s Party without a sour taste of disgust in one’s mouth for the worst features of Australianism; the party of the film has been a long night of grossness, in language, in coarse ruttishness, in intellectual pretensions without foundation, in wallowing in despair and failure.

Williamson’s play was set among the Melbourne types he knows so well; he has translated it into a Sydney-located film with the same deadly accuracy.

When the play was performed at the Royal Court in London about two and a half years ago, it shocked the English critics, who could not believe that such behaviour and such verbal in-fighting, with the only distinction in the language deriving from Williamson’s own turn of phrase, could be an accurate portrait of a subculture.

But it is. And Bruce Beresford’s film version retains the energy and the shock of recognition which Don’s Party conveys.

In a way, this film is better than any of the stage versions, since it is able to add all the small visual and period detail which so sharply bring back the shallowness of the 1969 Australian political scene, and the automaticity of the political responses of the Labor intellectuals.

Much the same is true of the Liberal supporters of the same ilk; but this film is not concerned with them, but with the middle-aged radicals with good jobs and a firmly ingrained belief in their own desserts at the hands of a Labor Government. With the benefit of retrospect, it is possible to understand much of what went wrong with the Labor Government.

Bruce Beresford has directed the film with considerable subtlety. Rather than attempting to maintain the crackling pace of the stage play, he has, with Williamson’s flexible approach to the script helping enormously, created a film with even more force.

For the first third or so the film is fairly leisurely with the general awfulness of the characters being depicted as they set about getting drunk and indicating their attitudes both to their own spouses and those of the other guests.

The television gives the running commentary on the election result which dominates the party before booze and lust begin to assert themselves, and as the fortunes of the Labor Party wane so does the drunkenness and loutishness of the behaviour wax.

More than on the stage, it is possible for the film to indicate just how swinish are the casual ruttings of these civilised, cultivated Australians — as they lurch from crisis to crisis, so does their contempt for each other, as well as their mutual dependence, become evident.

The women are defensive at first, the men aggressive.

At the end, the women are hopeless and defeated, the men exposed as empty and weak.

It is a scarifying indictment of the worst features of the Australian character, and of suburban life among the lumpen-intelligentsia, those who have been “liberated” from the polite conventions by a few years of youthful bohemianism but have been enslaved by ockerism and envy of success.

For each of them epitomises a kind of failure; political, literary, sexual, financial, intellectual, emotional.

Among the cast — which is put together in a way which completely justifies the judgment of the director as to the suitability of performer to part — the two who stand out most are Graeme Blundell, as Simon, the decent, modest, boring, political neutral little accountant with the Liberal wife, and Graham Kennedy, as Mack, the boozy and pathetic pervert who insists on photographing his wife nude and displaying the photos, and who induces her to seduce his friends.

Simon is really the only san person at the party, the only one who is not out to destroy himself or his spouse, or his friends. He, of course, gets treat abominably. Blundell succeeds in getting across perfectly how out of place such a person is in the madhouse of the party.

Kennedy, red-faced and bulging-eyed, with a pewter mug on a chain around his neck and beer dribbling down his chin likewise makes of Mack someone whose very nastiness is to be pitied; if ever there was an easily punctured bag of wind Mack is it. These are really the two simplest male characters, but they emerge as the only two with a shred of common humanity.

John Hargreaves, as Don the schoolteacher whose ambition to be a novelist has withered as his lack of talent became all too apparent to himself and his wife, portrays just the kind of shallow, sneaking, cowardly person who would hide his inadequacy under a veneer of social commitment, even skulking in the background while the girl he has been groping in the garden goes in to ask his wife if she minds if they use the bedroom.

The action builds up through the series of crises, until the very last revelation of all, that not even the closest of friends really like each other — they just hang together, like the embittered marriages in which they are embroiled.

Don McAlpine’s photography, in the difficult circumstances of filming in an actual house, dwells on the less than lovely features of even the two attractive women, casually predatory, who provide the sexual trigger for the action; sweat, booze and crude make-up are dwelt upon by the camera so that no illusion can remain undispelled.

At the end of the film, the cumulative sense of revulsion at the kind of evening which as passed before us, the very plausibility of the events and the skill with which the development is handled, leaves one shocked — and embarrassed for being, to some extent, a part of the same culture.

The person next to me said, as the lights went up, “I’m English.”

This kind of ruthless self-examination of the ugly side of Australianism can degenerate into just masochism, or, worse, the precious rejection of the totality of our culture. But this film constitutes the kind of precise surgery and exposure of very raw nerves which is long overdue in Australia.

Any one of us who can sit through this film and say, I have never behaved even a little bit like this one, or that one, is either a hypocrite, a new arrival, or a theatre critic.

This is a film which I hope will be screened widely outside of Australia, as well as at home; Australians have always been oversensitive to criticism, however well-directed, of their patterns of behaviour.

It is only by being prepared to accept just how bad some aspects of those patterns are, and by demonstrating to the rest of the world that we, as well as they, are capable of critically exposing them, that we will ever be able to both change ourselves, and change others’ perceptions of Australia.

Only a complex and mature culture can be pitiless to itself. The fact that Don’s Party is just that is the best evidence that we are capable of putting the events of election night 1969, and their real parallels, into the background.

And in achieving this, the film is far superior to the play which inspired it. For the play, such is the dominance of fast and superbly written lines, cannot penetrate as deeply beneath the skin as it should. One can imagine Don himself reviewing the play, and smugly praising it as a piece of drawing-room comedy.

To criticise the film, and the actors’ performances, in terms of stage productions of the play is totally irrelevant. The film says much more and says it much better than stage versions which simply do not have its impact and sting.

***
2.
P. P. McGuinness, “A fine piece of Australian gallows humour,” The National Times, October 6-11, 1975, p. 44.

Australians have always had, despite a well-developed mythology to the contrary, a timid respect for authority and a tolerance for misbehaviour on the part of the visible symbols of State power, the police, which extends almost to support for police violence used against unpopular individuals or groups.

David Williamson’s play, The Removalists, exposed this ambivalence beautifully, first inveigling the audience into laughing indulgently at the casual evidences of disrespect for the law in the ordinary work of a small police station, then escalating this into a situation where ordinary people witness the brutal treatment of a man for whom we have little sympathy with little protest, and culminating in a climax of what might best be described as the blackest of gallows humour.

The film version of The Removalists (Hoyts Cinema Centre, Melbourne; opening shortly in Sydney) does not attempt to move far from the form or situations of the play, and of course retains most of Williamson’s excellent dialogue. There is no reason to think that a filmed play is any worse than any other kind of film (as the offerings of the American Film Theatre have so brilliantly demonstrated over the past few months); it is a different kind of film, that is all, paying greater attention to the spoken word.

As a film, The Removalists works very well indeed, building up slowly (perhaps too slowly in the early stages) to the final tragedy, the climax which is all the more horrifying for the way in which the levity of the early sequences has seduced us into thinking we are just looking at social comedy.

It is refreshing to come to a film which is not obsessed with the nostalgia concerning the past and the country which infests the Australian film industry: this film is set firmly and unapologetically in the real Australia, the Australia of a highly urbanised way of life, dingy little structures like the police station, badly constructed and designed apartments filled with shoddy furniture, dominated by the television set.

In these cramped interiors almost the whole of the action unwinds — the latter half almost unrelievedly stays in the living room and kitchen — when the victim of the police attentions handcuffed helplessly to a room divider, railing at the police and his sister-in-law, while the furniture is removed piece by piece to the new flat his departing wife has rented.

The performance of Martin Harris as Kenny, the boozing tough who beats his wife and continually provokes the police into beating him, is superb. A thoroughly unlikable character, he nevertheless evokes a sneaking sympathy.

In fact the film is perfectly cast, with not one foot wrong. Peter Cummins and John Hargreaves as the older and younger cops portray on the one hand the callousness and hysteria of long failure and on the other the callowness and cowardice of the new recruit.

Jacki Weaver as a rather scatty dumb blonde who clearly shows her continued attraction to her husband, even while exasperated by his behaviour, and Kate Fitzpatrick as the snooty elder sister with a nice home, a nice husband, and a nice little string of adulteries are cruelly accurate. Chris Haywood (as what might, by an abuse of the English language, be called the eponymous removalist), too, gives a tight portrayal of the touchy tradesman who cares about nothing so long as he is not obstructed in his narrow business.

Unusually for Australian films, The Removalists has been filmed with considerable attention to the quality of colour and light, and to the music of the sound track. The latter is the work of Galapagos Duck, and has been released as a record, while the former reflects the almost obsessive perfectionism of the film’s producer and designer, Margaret Fink.

The Removalists is another demonstration (like Between Wars and a few others) of the fact that the Australian film industry can produce films equal to the best of the products of other countries in all respects — technical, artistic and acting. And like them it evidences that the most vital necessity of successful film-making, the co-existence of artistic sensibility with organisational and administrative skills of a high order, and with energy and drive, is present too.

***
3.
P. P. McGuinness, “‘Petersen’ is not son of ‘Alvin Purple’ though there is a trace,” The National Times, October 28-November 2, 1974, p. 53.

Inside Tim Burstall’s latest film, Petersen (Rapallo, Sydney) there is the germ of what could have been a really good film. Unfortunately, it is only that — Petersen, as it is, must be described as a failure.

This is not to say it will not be a commercial success — I have no pretensions to be any better at judging the market than the distributors, which is to say I haven’t a clue.

But as a film this is not a dishonourable failure; quite the contrary it has finally convinced me that Burstall may yet produce some very good films indeed.

Now that he has the commercial success of that awful piece of ocker prurience Alvin Purple behind him as evidence of his crowd-pleasing capabilities, he seems to want to move on, not just do the same thing over and over.

The invited audience at the premiere of the film in Sydney last week obviously thought that they were getting an Alvin Purple, part two. So they sniggered at any sexual reference, applauded when the stars stripped for action, and laughed when they thought there was a joke, all without realising that this was not the film they thought it was.

This is partly Burstall’s fault, for the first half of the film is pretty awful, and does show traces of Alvin. It is shot, too, as if it were a cigarette commercial, with freeze shots, and a naked couple running down the beach hand in hand — one kept waiting for them to pause and light something. The fact that the script contains a self-sending-up line about Elvira Madigan and films like cigarette commercials, does not save the matter.

Quite the contrary, it makes it worse since it is clear that the director knew he was doing badly.

However, about half-way through, the film takes a sudden turn for the better, and gets really interesting and at times quite impressive. This is when sexual titillation is abandoned, and serious social aspects intrude into the story.

Petersen (played by Jack Thomson, with boyish good looks and charm, which is one of the reasons for the confusion with Alvin) is a mature age Arts student at Melbourne University, an electrician by trade who has developed intellectual interests.

He is married with two young children, impatient with his “dumb” working-class wife (Jacki Weaver), and having an affair with his English professor’s wife, who is also a tutor in the University English department.

The affair leads to his withdrawal from the university, hurt. He finds that the professor does not hesitate to mark down his exam paper out of personal spite, that the wife, while enjoying her crude proletarian lover and talking of having a child with him, has all along coolly been preparing to leave for Oxford.

He finds to his shock and anguish that women can treat men as sexual conveniences — which is, of course, just his attitude to his wife. He finds, too, that academics are not the shining intellects he had believed them to be, but mean, petty and stupid people.

The university milieu is one that both Tim Burstall and David Williamson know well, and Williamson’s script in the sequences directly concerned with the university is biting and dead-accurate. He has the academics pinned down like insects on cardboard.

Arthur Dignam, as the posturing Professor of English puts in a superb performance. Here is just the kind of worthless and pretentious barren-minded prig which throngs the groves of academe, and particularly departments such as English.

Wendy Hughes as the wife is very good, too: at first sight she seems warm, loving, attractive (though one might wonder about the character of a woman who rolls on the office floor with her lover while her husband listens just outside the door). Gradually, however, she emerges as the kind of female academic who is, alas, all too common — cold, ambitious, grasping and cynical, completely impervious to real intellectual standards, or even professional ethics.

She admits that her husband has marked down Petersen’s exam paper in order to fail him, but simply shrugs it off — she is not interested or concerned.

Fortunately, our universities are not entirely populated by the types which Burstall and Williamson delineate here. They are not conducting a sociological survey. But they are very precisely showing what a lot of academics are like, something which has never to my memory been done with such success in a film.

Usually academics on the screen are caricatures. Here they are not; this is real life in the universities.

It is a great pity that so much irrelevant to this theme intrudes in the film; things like a bikie gang breaking up a party, the cigarette commercials and so on. For with more care on the part of both director and writer (you can’t blame the actors — there’s not a single bad performance), and less obeisance to the box office virtues of Alvin Purple, this could have been a really first-rate film.

Anyway, now we can look forward to Burstall’s next film with real hope that his early talent will finally flower, and has not been lost in the mire of Carry On style films.

Annual report a disgrace
The Australian Film Development Corporation’s annual report for the year ended June 24 is something of a disgrace.

Virtually no useful information about the activities of the AFDC, the films which it has financed and is financing being simply listed with the minimum of detail, is given; nor are the accounts of any use at all in coming to some judgment of the AFDC’s financial performance.

Of course, in this it is typical of most statutory authorities, who seem to equate their independence of ministerial direction as an incentive to conceal information from the public and the Parliament to which they report. The only thing the accounts reveal is that no one has had his fingers in the till without proper authorisation.

There is no way in which a member of Parliament, or anybody else, could judge whether the AFDC is doing useful work or not, or how it is doing its work, on the basis of this report.

There is not even the beginnings of the provision of an adequate information base by which to judge the criteria of financing, and the policy towards assistance to film-making of the AFDC.

This is not to say that the Corporation has not done quite a few useful things; it has. But if it is doing good, it is doing good by stealth.

It is simply not enough for the Corporation to list a few of the things it is doing. We are entitled to know a lot more.

Clearly the AFDC thinks film critics are a lot of fools. Thus of Alvin Purple it says that it was “received enthusiastically by audiences, if not by critics,” and of Stone it says, “this film was not well-received by the critics, but is currently playing to enthusiastic audiences.”

In other words, to the AFDC there is no criterion of quality save commercial success. In this, as the Swedish Film Institute people here recently pointed out, they show their short-sightedness, for in the long-run commercial success depends on making good films.

But while we are on the subject of commercial success as the criterion of overall success, how do we take the fact that the AFDC lost $180,000 last year?

***
4.
P. P. McGuinness, “A master of black humour talks on authoritarianism, plays and films: Williamson looks for his screenplay role,” The National Times, August 21-26, 1972, p. 20.

David Williamson’s height always surprising people on first meeting — he is about 6ft 7in — and he must be heartily sick of people remarking on it. But it is so remarkable that it must be mentioned.

It has its amusing aspects, too: one of the sights of the Australian Writers’ Guild annual dinner this year was a conversation between Williamson, Tony Morphett and Margaret Whitlam, with every else in the group looking like gnomes by comparison.

But more important than physique is Williamson’s stature as a playwright, which is growing daily; he has rapidly emerged as one of Australia’s leading playwrights, who has a lot to say about our society and its effects on individual behaviour.

The Removalists, which is currently playing in Sydney (at the Playbox), is a chilling exercise in black humour, continuing some of the strongest and most effective social criticism that can be found today in any medium.

Talking about The Removalists to me last week, Williamson described the play not as an attack on the police (two policemen beat up a man, and accidentally kill him), but on the corrupting effect of authoritarianism on people’s behaviour.

“It wasn’t a statement about the police at all,” he said. “It was just a very good dramatic situation. The police are interesting characters because in our society they’ve got much more real power than their nominal power, simply because people unthinkingly do what they tell them. A policeman usually can exceed his authority to quite an extent before people will ever really object.

“Particularly at a lower middle-class level, which is the most authoritarian level in the society, a policeman can practically tell people to jump off the Harbour Bridge, and they would, because there’s a tremendous acceptance of authority in Australia.

“The popular myth that Australians are individualistic and independent is the greatest load of crap. There’s a surface cynicism about authority overlaying a deep-rooted need for authority. How else can you explain the Menzies phenomenon?”

Williamson is a lecturer in mechanical engineering and psychology at the Swinburne Institute of Technology in Melbourne. This combination, strange at first sight, derives from the fact that after he took his engineering degree at Monash, he did postgraduate work at Melbourne University in psychology and sociology.

Asked how his engineering students liked being lectured to by a well-known playwright, he said of his students:

“They’re really great guys, intelligent most of them, but they’ve been pressed into a science straitjacket from about 12th Form onwards and they’re sort of naïve in respect to the social forces and economic forces at work in society. But they’re generally quite responsive once you get them interested enough.

“As a practical example of why I say Australia is an authoritarian society, I have to dissuade the majority of students from calling me ‘sir’. I tell them I haven’t been knighted or anything like that. There’s a tremendous deference towards authority that’s partly due to the school system. I think it’s the greatest training ground for authoritarianism in Australia.

“The basis of authoritarianism is that people are arranged in a status hierarchy and they expect to be valued less as human beings as they go down the status hierarchy, the ones that accept authoritarianism.

“Therefore a student, if he is an authoritarian, doesn’t mind being pushed around because he sees his beliefs, studies and needs as being unimportant compared with someone on a higher rung on the status hierarchy. I really feel good when a student comes up and says, ‘Well look, I’m not going to do that’, if he knows why he’s saying it.”

Already the film rights to The Removalists and Don’s Party (“It’s about jaded political hopes, about ALP supporters who are now living a pretty affluent sort of life style and supporting the ALP like they support their local football team”) have been sold; but Williamson is not altogether happy about the prospect of seeing his plays filmed.

He would prefer to write original film scripts, and has in fact been commissioned to write a script for the first venture into production of the Australian film distributors, Roadshow.

This will be a full-length feature film, directed by Tim Burstall (who directed Stork).

“I would like to get involved with films,” Williamson said. “I like writing films but there are certain disadvantages as a film writer in Australia. This deal with Roadshow is the first time I’ve been able to do an original screenplay which is an incredibly rare opportunity for an Australian writer.

“I jumped at the chance because it is so rare; because of the economics of the situation producers are usually terribly conservative about what they actually film and they’ll go to some third-rate novel and do it rather than get a good writer to write an original screenplay.

“This is really absurd and I think they’re mad, but you can understand it in the sense that there’s an awful lot of money hanging on it, and they prefer to back a third-rate semi-certainty.

“I’d rather write original screenplays than have my stage plays adapted, because then you know what you’re writing about from the start. There’s about as much in common between drama writing and screen writing as there is between poetry and writing essays — in fact the novel is probably closer to the screenplay than is the stage play. Sure I want to keep on writing plays, but I want them to be plays.

“Stork was in a sense an example of this. It was originally a stage play, but it was converted to a film, and Tim was very concerned that it had to be a commercial film.

“A fellow I was speaking to today made the point that both the Barry McKenzie film and Stork were eminently safe in the sense that there was nothing whatsoever controversial about either of them, and we were very conscious of this. When I was writing, this was in fact the whole thing, that with the industry in such a desperate position you were forced to keep it safe.

“Of course some awfully good films have been written originally as stage plays, but it’s much better to write straight for the screen.

“But what keeps you thinking about drama is the fact that a dramatist can compete on more even terms with overseas dramatists here, because he knows that basically he’s getting the same pool of acting talent doing his plays here, he’ll be getting the same directorial talent.

“And it’s hard for a writer to find a place in the film medium, they just assume you are a drama writer, that you do write films but … the auteur theory is pretty ragingly held by film critics and film-makers these days, which is stupid for commercial films and makes it hard for a writer to feel comfortable around film-making.

“Some of the directors say, ‘Look, we need a few words here, what do you say?’ Actually, the writer should construct the whole; the emotional structure of the film can come from a writer. Even though the dialogue may be very sparse, the whole emotional dynamics that make a scene work come from the characterisation and the setting up of a scene.

“Tim Burstall was good about this. He sees his role as a director as being as much a co-ordinator of other people’s talent as being the one who sees that his personal imprint goes on the film.”