Box Office Browning

by Peter Corris

  'Don't get on your high horse. D'you know much about the Kelly gang, T . . . Richard?'

  'Dick,' says I. 'Not much.'

  'Well, you'd better bone up. Harry will be calling a press conference pretty soon; you'll have to be there and you'll have to be able to say something!

  Melbourne had one of the best public libraries in the world at that time. It was said that the first purchase had been all the works mentioned in the footnotes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Whether that was true or not, they certainly had a big Kelly collection - books and pamphlets, the report of the Royal Commission on the Kelly outbreak, newspaper articles and the like.

  It was a strange occupation for a chap like me, to be sitting in a vast circular reading room under the eye of a supervisor, who sat on a sort of podium in the middle of the room able to look down all the 'spokes' of the wheel – which was how the tables were arranged if you get my drift. I kept at it because I wanted to make good in the picture game and because I found the Kelly story interesting in itself. Who knows, I might have been related to the Kellys. There were certainly enough convicts and scoundrels on both sides of the family to have made it possible. I've studied up on a few things in my life since – mostly card tricks I'll own, but also the antebellum South for that animal Selznick's lousy picture and on French Morocco for Casablanca16 – but I don't remember any reading I did with more enthusiasm than that on the Kellys. Then, of course, I did it young and sober in the Melbourne Public Library, later it was with cigarettes and bourbon in the Garden of Allah and such places. Well, both methods have their points.

  I didn't just do research. I wrote off to Sydney for my birth registration and applied for a passport in my real name. All the functions of the Commonwealth Government were in Melbourne then (they should have left them there in my view, instead of creating that fly-blown money burner in the middle of nowhere they call Canberra), which made things easier. In those days you could get yourself identified by your bank manager and I soon got on good terms with the Bank of New South Wales in Collins Street. I had some money saved from my work in London and, as a well-dressed associate of Mr Southwell, I was persona grata there if not at Government House. That passport with my likeness and real monniker on it gave me a feeling of security.

  Harry got on with the business of raising money and interest in his film. The Kelly story had been filmed before, in 1906, but when did that ever stop a film-maker, from that day to this? (I have the dubious distinction of having worked on all three versions of The Mutiny on the Bounty. I've heard talk of a fourth and I wouldn't be surprised if they call me in for that, too.) Not that Harry didn't encounter some opposition: it was a busy time for films in Australia; I think a dozen or so were made in 1918, and competition for production cash was fierce. Apart from that, there was a wowser spirit still abroad that persisted in Australia, so it seems to me, until the 1970s. (The last time I went back, in 1975, things had changed so much that half the men in Sydney were in drag.) In 1919 this wowserism took the form of an objection to bushranging films, as if most of the pictures made in the country to that time weren't on this theme and half the people descended from lawbreakers. Harry got around this somehow, with a combination of Welsh and Yankee slickness which was never on such fine display as at the press meeting he organised some time in late August.

  We'd moved out of the Menzies into a house in Fitzroy by then and Harry summoned the gentlemen of the press to meet us in the Fitzroy Gardens. I was got up in the uniform of a trooper in the Victoria Police, vintage 1880, and I had to put a cross-grained chestnut through a few smart paces. Luckily, I'd been practising out at the Caulfield racecourse and I was able to put on a pretty good show of jumping and turning on a penny piece. Harry had suggested some shooting but I'd drawn the line at that. I was never as keen on shooting after 1917 as I had been before although I retained the skill.

  It was a cold day in the park but Harry had provided hot rum which is all that is ever required to get a good press. He oiled the bowler hats and cloth caps up and threw the meeting open to questions.

  'Why d'you want to make a film about the Kellys?' asked the man from the Argus.

  Harry had been in Hollywood long enough to know that the way to answer a question is to ask one. 'Where would Ned have been in 1915?' he said.

  Perhaps they were a little too well-oiled; the Argusman, a heavily built fellow who looked as if he belonged on the wharves, certainly was. He blinked and I had to step in with the answer.

  'At Gallipoli,' I said.

  'Right,' says Harry.

  That set them buzzing, not that it stopped them drinking. The man from the Bulletin took off his cap and scratched his head. 'Do you mean that Ned Kelly should be seen as a national hero, Mr Southwell?'

  'He would've been, if he'd been alive in 1915.'

  Double talk, you see, but the sort of thing a journalist can get his teeth into. I was standing a little apart from the tight group of men because I had to attend to the horse from time to time. One of the writers, a little weasel-faced fellow, sidled up to me with his notebook at the ready.

  'I hear you saved Mr Southwell's life, Mr Browning?'

  'Where did you hear that?' says I, gruffly.

  'From Mrs Southwell.'

  Clever Harry. Although Jimmy Wilde was always the real 'Welsh wizard' for mine, the claim Harry Southwell laid to the title wasn't without foundation. He plied them with more rum and when one of them finally asked who would play Ned Kelly in the film Harry waited until all the tin cups (an authentic bush touch, you see) were lowered before he answered.

  'Godfrey Cass.'

  Well, it doesn't mean a hill of beans to you now, but it meant something then. Cass had been a famous stage actor for a good few years and his name was likely to attract investors and the public. One of the reporters then piped up with a very sensible question: 'Why not Mr Browning for the part of Ned?'

  'I am considering Mr Browning for a variety of roles.' He smiled and dippered rum into the nearest cup. 'In fact he may play a variety of roles; he will certainly be involved in the trick riding.'

  There was some more buzz at this; Harry later told me that in Hollywood films it was common for the one actor to play several parts, but it was unknown in Australia at that time. The remark about the riding should have alerted me to what was in store, but I was young, puffed up with pride at the attention and, truth to tell, I'd had a few cups of rum myself by this stage. So I just preened and patted the horse and accepted a cigarette. The foxy little scribbler who'd questioned me before buttonholed me again.

  'Were you in the war, Mr Browning?' says he, pencil poised.

  'Er, yes.'

  'In what capacity.'

  'Ambulance driver, British unit.'

  'You saw action in France?'

  'My word I did. Excuse me, I have to deal with this horse.'

  I think it was that brief exchange which reconciled me to not taking a leading part in the film. Too many interviews with long-nosed characters like him and I could've been tying myself in knots and prompting embarrassing questions in the wrong quarter. The meeting broke up with Harry promising further startling announcements from Southwell Screen Plays, as he'd styled his production company, and further outdoor entertainments.

  The horse was stabled in North Carlton and Harry and I set out to walk there for the exercise. We waited while a tram rattled past and crossed the road to walk through one of the gardens that ringed the northern part of the city.

  'What're these announcements, Harry?' I said. 'You've already made the great koala announcement.' I got a bit of fun kidding Harry about that – he had a koala bear as the emblem of the production company. God knows whose idea that was.

  I'm going to make five pictures, Tony. Five.'

  'Dick,' says I. 'Better get this one underway first. How's the screenplay coming?'

  'Slowly. There's so much to get in. I need your help on that, Tony.'

  'Dick, Harry, Dick. Okay, boss, wh
atever you say.'

  'Your American accent is terrible, most actors' voices are terrible. Thank God there's no sound with pictures.'

  'How could there be?' I said. 'That's impossible. Steady, boy.' This was for the horse which was shying at a small dog scampering on the grass. 'How's the money side of things looking?'

  Harry glanced sidelong at me. I hadn't been paid for three weeks and this wasn't the first time I'd reminded him of it. 'Looking better; let's do some work on the screenplay tonight. I'll give you a cheque tomorrow.'

  That was Harry; nothing for nothing and damn little for sixpence.

  18

  By October Harry had the money and the weather he needed. As it turned out, my ignorance of the geography of Victoria didn't matter because the film was shot in a makeshift outdoor studio just up the road in Coburg. There were some location scenes around Melbourne, particularly the Glenrowan Hotel sequences, but we never got closer to Kelly country than the south end of the Sydney Road.

  Harry's notion of a script was a bundle of cards, several copies of a card for each scene, which he handed around to the players and anyone else involved. The handwriting wasn't always easy to understand and sometimes people got the wrong cards and the result was a shambles. Harry had had less experience at film directing than he said; in fact sometimes I thought perhaps he'd had none. He wore the right clothes, plus fours, loose coats, berets etc., and seemed to know how to act like a director but not how to be one. There was some experience available: among the leading players were several members of a theatrical family by the name of Inman and they seemed to have a few clues. Godfrey Cass I'm not sure about; he was wooden, but so were nearly all actors in those days.

  Part of the problem lay in the scenario and there were two reasons for this. One was that Southwell had tried to pack it all in – Ned's early misfortunes, the fight with 'Wild' Wright, run-ins with the police, Kate Kelly and the coppers, Stringybark Creek, the robberies and escapes, the death of Sherritt, the Hotel fire, the siege, the capture of Ned, the trial and hanging. Harry had no sense of selection; if there'd been a story about Ned in his cradle we'd have filmed that, too. His second mistake was in calling on me to help with the story. I found the whole Kelly tale bloody depressing and I tried to lift it in spots with a little humour.

  I had the police fall off their horses and a few other touches like that (I think I was influenced a little by Mack Sennett). I worked hard to get a love interest between Ned and a squatter's daughter going but I encountered a fair bit of resistance to that. Something of it got into the film but I think the overall effect was confusing. I remember I wanted to keep the shots where the corpse of Joe Byrne, which the police propped up against a wall for the photographers, kept falling down. I laughed fit to kill myself and I thought it would be a good tension breaker, but I was over-ruled.

  We had the usual technical problems, perhaps not quite as many as I saw forty years later on Cleopatra, but enough. There were equipment failures, torn costumes, sick horses and bad weather. The whole crew absented itself on Melbourne Cup Day which was something Harry hadn't anticipated. Nor had I. I turned up with the horses for the day's work and there was the set, all flapping black cloth and creaking, tacked-together timbers, and Harry wandering about and not another soul in sight.

  'Where the hell is everybody?' Harry moaned. 'We've got big scenes today.'

  I looked around and then I remembered how quiet the roads had been. 'I remember now. It's a holiday.'

  'A holiday?' shouts Harry. 'What is it, the goddamn King's goddamn birthday again?'

  'No, it's Cup Day.'

  'What's that?' Harry was working night and day on the picture, never seeing a newspaper.

  'A horse race.'

  'Christ, what a country!' I was mad myself – I could've gone to the races.

  By the end of the shooting, horses were the last things I'd have wanted to see, racing or playing the violin. I was at it day after day, setting up the riding scenes, rehearsing the actors and nursing the bloody horses. I didn't have to duplicate my leap from one running horse to another which must have been one thing Harry couldn't manage to cram into the script, but there were other things like jumping fences and running up rabbit-holed hillsides that were quite dangerous enough for me. I took a few spills but considered myself lucky to get off without breaking bones.

  Harry was paying up more or less on time by this stage and I was well-fixed for money. I learned the truth of what he'd said about Hollywood, that picture-making left everyone too tired for mischief through the week but the weekends were a different matter. Melbourne was a pretty lively place in those days as people recovered from the depressing years of the war. The liquor trading hours were still restricted so there was a lively sly grog scene accompanied by gambling, good-time girls and a lot of cocaine. It amuses me now to hear young people ratting on about 'coke' as if they invented it – Melbourne was awash with the stuff in 1920. You could get it at certain suburban chemists and from a couple of dentists and doctors – some of the latter at the best addresses.

  Things were organised then as now, with the police heavily involved as suppliers and protectors. It was rough too. The rival gangs fought over the territory with bottles and knives and guns. Two gang leaders shot it out at the intersection of Swanston and Little Collins Streets (which is like doing it at Broadway and 47th), and I've seen big, tough hotel-keepers go pale when Squizzy Taylor walked in. He created much the same effect as Dutch Schultz and, of course, he ended up much the same way.17

  Harry and Annette kept a pretty sedate house in Fitzroy. We'd go back there after work on Friday with a few of the crew and cast and have a few drinks but it was lights out around eleven. That grog would've picked me up and made my rattled bones less sore, so I'd kick on with a few pals until the early hours. With luck, we'd find a few girls in one of the late night places and stay overnight with them somewhere and head off to the beaches or the hills on Saturday. There were bottles and borrowed cars and rugs and sandwiches and, as like as not, someone sick and crying by the finish of the weekend. It was all harmless fun and wasn't Harry going to make five films and weren't we all going to be rich?

  Although it must have been the worst organised production since Lumière set the whole business going,18 I learned a lot from the making of The Kelly Gang. (The Lumière reference shows you that I learned something about the history of the cinema, too.) The studio at Coburg was an old warehouse with a deep backyard; it had lofts and fences and other things useful for filming. We blacked out the windows with tar paper for night shots and used the natural light for everything else. It was before the days of smog and clear days were really clear so that you could shoot from soon after dawn until late in the afternoon. It had to be a pretty obtrusive moving shadow to worry a director in those days.

  The greatest difference between a movie set then and now was the noise. No-one worried about noise in 1919 – dogs barking, things falling to the floors, voices, nothing mattered. A carpenter could shout for a hammer in the middle of filming Aaron Sherritt's dying words to Ned (there were a lot of liberties taken with the historical truth), and no-one gave a damn. Later, when I was in Hollywood, I often saw three movies filming in the studio at the same time with a steady roar of instructions and equipment noise going on throughout. We were spared that in Coburg, but no-one used to the hush of the modern movie set would have credited that we were making a film.

  There were fewer hangers-on, too. All those girls in boots you see nowadays, carrying clipboards and performing minuscule tasks for the director and actors, are a modern necessity. We had the basic team – actors, director, one woman for make-up and wardrobe, a props man and two cameramen. They would have an assistant if they were lucky.

  Fortunately, we did have a stills photographer. I say fortunately because it was the holder of this office, Helen Hawes, who became my especial friend during the filming of The Kelly Gang. Helen was an unusual woman: she was about forty and having tried unsuccessfully
to be an artist in her twenties had turned successfully and profitably to photography. She did portraits of the rich inside and outside their houses and they paid her well. She took pictures of the poor, exhibited them in tiny places where no-one went, and the cognoscenti said she was a genius. She was happy.

  I recall one day, after we'd coupled furiously on a rug on a hillside overlooking the bay at Mount Eliza, I stroked her long, slim flank and asked her why she smiled so much. She reached up and gripped my moustache in her long, strong fingers. She was a long, strong woman – built slender but with whippy muscles. Her hair was a chestnut colour, possibly naturally so, and her eyes (I think) were green.

  'You will find, my poor Richard, that there are two sides to your nature. Reconciling the needs of the two sides is the problem of life. He or she who reconciles them is happy. I have, so I smile.'

  'What two sides have you reconciled?'

  She stretched. She was wearing only a thin shirt, having shed her stockings, underwear, shoes and long skirt. Everything was almost within reach, but I was tired after a lot of wine and our fun and games. 'The artistic and commercial,' she said. 'Do you understand?'

  'I think so. What about me? What're the two sides to my nature?'

  'That, Richard, dear, is something you have to find out for yourself.'

  'You mean I have to find them and then . . . what was it again?'

  'Reconcile them, yes.'

  'It sounds like hard work.'

  'It is.'

  I lay back and looked up through the waving gum trees at the blue sky and tried for some answers. I think it was the closest I ever came in my life to self-examination (I don't include the endless sessions with psychiatrists later, that was all sham and show), and do you know what I came up with? Nothing. Not a damn thing. I still don't know what the two sides to my nature are or how to reconcile them – that is, unless they're lust and laziness which don't seem to need much reconciliation.