Buckley doesn’t rate the film highly, but he remembers it fondly. He was working for the newsreel company Cinesound, helping to capture for posterity the damp celebrities on the red carpet. A little bit of Hollywood hoopla had come to Market Street.Īlso in the audience that night was a budding film-maker in his twenties called Anthony Buckley. After the film was shown that night fifty years ago, Drynan joined her older, more experienced cast mates up on stage: Chiari, Chips Rafferty, Ed Devereaux and Slim de Grey. There was lots of excitement about this film,” she told me recently by phone from her home in Los Angeles. Today, after a long and illustrious acting career, she is best remembered for her roles in classic Australian films like Don’s Party and Muriel’s Wedding. Fresh out of NIDA, she played Betty, the newlywed wife of Nino’s friend, Jimmy. Standing nervously backstage that night, “freshly made up with big hair and lots of eye make-up” and wearing a pair of fashionable culottes bought specially for the occasion, was a teenaged Jeanie Drynan. Reading the book today, you have to remind yourself that it, and the film, were released at a time when Italian migrants would have been referred to in polite circles as “New Australians” but in the nation’s public bars as “wogs,” “dagoes” and “eyeties.” Nino never encounters prejudice he is accepted easily into Australian society because he accepts so easily its habits of speech and thought. Published in 1957, it sold in its millions.īesides its humour, the book probably found favour with Australian readers because it portrayed them in such a flattering light. It’s a benign portrait of the migrant experience in Australia, and gently mocks the nation’s dominant Anglo-Saxon suburbanite culture. In spite of the weather, They’re a Weird Mob was being launched onto the world stage in some style.īased on the bestselling novel by a former pharmacist called John O’Grady (writing under the pseudonym Nino Culotta), They’re a Weird Mob tells the – ever so slightly satirical – story of an Italian journalist’s encounter with the strange manners, language and rituals of postwar Australia. Foreign glamour arrived in the shape of the movie’s star, the Italian actor and comedian Walter Chiari. Amid flashing bulbs, a procession of local celebrities and dignitaries tramped up a sodden red carpet. But on a wet winter’s night back in 1966, a film that would help reactivate Australia’s moribund motion picture industry had its premiere there. Today, this glorious temple to cinema hosts music, ballet, stand-up comedians and the annual Sydney Film Festival. Built in 1929, it seats over 2000 patrons in the faux classical opulence favoured by early designers of picture palaces.
For that old-style Jaffa-rolling movie experience, you can’t go past the State Theatre in Sydney’s Market Street.
0 kommentar(er)
