Australian version of the Boer War

Press, 30 April 1981, Page 14

Australian version of the Boer War

Australia’s highly acclaimed “Breaker Morant” has finally found its way to Christchurch to begin at the Westend tomorrow. When the film’s director (Bruce Beresford) and star (Jack Thompson) were in New York for its opening there,- they were interviewed by Richard Freedman, of the Newhouse News Service (through NZPA): . Jack Thompson, who is frequently dubbed the Australian Robert Redford, is a rather burly blond with the florid complexion of a man who has worked in the sun a lot (or not enough Claytons). In fact, he’s a rancher who proudly proclaims that when he appeared in “Sunday too Far Away,” a film about Australia’s rugged itinerant sheep-shearers: “I was the only actor there who could actually shear a sheep.” The broad accent and command of slang he adopts for “Sunday” is so Australian the film may need subtitles in other parts of the world.

Bruce Beresford, on the other hand, is a slim, darkhaired intellectual who looks and talks as if he would be more at home lecturing on philosophy at Oxford than crouched behind a movie camera.

Raised on Australian television, he spent a decade working in England until the home product was ready for him.

“Our film industry is only 10 years old,” he says, “because in 1971 the Australian Film Development Corporation — now it’s called The Australian Film Commission — got started. “They provided 45 per cent of the $900,000 it cost to make ‘Breaker Morant.’ “Before the commission, film in Australia was a medium of expression which had been properly tapped. But desire to make movies was building up like a pressure cooker. It had to explode some time. “The only problem with making films in Australia now is they don’t get the big push a big company can give them. We had to make ‘Breaker Morant’ on a sixweek schedule, which was crazy. It nearly killed me.”

The film is about a miscarriage of military justice in the British Army during the Boer War. Morant — an actual historical figure — was an Englishman who had

emigrated to Australia to become a famous horsebreaker (hence his nickname). For authenticity’s sake, he is played by the only English actor in the film, Edward Woodward. In South Africa, he and two other army officers are accused of killing half-a-dozen Boer prisoners and a supposedly neutral German missionary.

They are court-martialled. Thompson plays their defence lawyer, an untried back-country solicitor given only one day to prepare his case.

Thompson’s lawyer rightly contends that under the circumstances of guerrilla warfare the killing of prisoners was commonplace, condoned by verbal orders from Lord Kitchener himself. But the men are made to pay for their act — an embarrassment to Britain, then trying to negotiate peace with the Boers and anxious about world opinion. The parallels to the case of Lt William Calley arising from the My Lai massacre of civilians in Vietnam are obvious.

“I wouldn’t have made ‘Breaker Morant’ if it didn’t have contemporary parallels,” Beresford says. “The same is even true of ‘The Getting of Wisdom,’ which takes place in a Victorian girls’ school.

“Nor are the movies set in the past as a sort of exercise in nostalgia. A man I met who had served in Vietnam told me that seeing ‘Morant’ had changed his life.. “I have an uncle who told me about shooting Japanese prisoners in New Guinea during World War 11. I was appalled but he said: ‘You just don’t understand what it’s like.’

“I served in the army myself for six months, and although I didn’t see any action, I did learn that soldiers are in no position to say if an order from above is proper or not. If you questioned an order,'they simply flattened you.”

What attracted Beresford above all to the story of Breaker Morant was its moral complexity. Although it is being compared to Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” of 1957, about a kangaroo court martial used as an army coverup for an outbreak of cowar-

dice on the Western Front in World War I, Beresford claims his film is far less simple than the Kubrick masterpiece. “The fact that they, indeed, shot the missionary wasn’t even known until 1929, when one of the men confessed it,” he says.

“In the play ‘Morant’ is based on, it’s’ left out entirely. When the lawyer learned of it, he went' to pieces and became an embittered recluse." Because of the virile action in “Breaker Morant,” Beresford also has been compared to the British director, David Lean (“The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Lawrence of Arabia”), which irritates him no end. “I hate Lean’s films,” he says. “They’re so studied, and the acting so dull. My favourite directors are Carol Reed, John Ford sometimes, Robert Altman and, above all, Satyajit Ray. “I could see any movie of Ray’s 20 times, they’re so full of detail.”

Most Australian films seem to be set at the turn of the century but Beresford is determined to bring them more up to date. Already released in Australia is “The Club,” about a contemporary Melbourne football team. And he is working on “Puberty Blues,” which sounds as different as could be from “The Getting of Wisdom” and “Breaker Morant.”

“It’s set in a Sydney beach town,” Beresford says, “where they have a surfing cult. The biggest thing a girl can do there is be taken up as a groupie by one of the top surfers. “The movie is based on a novel written by two 16-year-old girls who were expelled from school for writing it.” Another Australian novel, “The Thorn Birds,” was a great best-seller but Thompson and Beresford despise it.

Thompson, who at one time was being considered to play a leading role in the film version, dismisses “The Thorn Birds” as “ideal for a television mini series — it’s just historical soap.” And lest you think this is sour grapes on the actor’s part, his director happily chimes in, calling it “one of the worst novels I’ve ever read,