Australia

THE BARREN YEARS: 1945 TO 1969

Unfortunately, Forty Thousand Horsemen , which premiered six months after Cinesound's final film, Dad Rudd, MP , marked the end of an era. For the next thirty years the Australian film industry diminished to a point where, in the 1960s, it barely existed. Only nine Australian feature films, produced independently, were released during World War II. The high point, however, was not a feature film but Kokoda Front Line , a special edition of the weekly newsreel Cinesound Review , which

won an Academy Award ^® for the best documentary in 1942. After the war the British studio Ealing tried hard to convince Greater Union, the parent company for Cinesound, to join with it in the production of Australian films. This followed the worldwide success of Ealing's first Australian production, The Overlanders (1946), an epic adventure starring Chips Rafferty (1909–1971) as the leader of a small group who drive eighty-five-thousand cattle two thousand miles from Western Australia to the Queensland coast during the early years of World War II. Greater Union, however, was not interested in resuming production, and after two more films Ealing abandoned its plan.

This was symptomatic of the 1950s, a decade of lost opportunities. Only a few filmmakers, such as the New Zealander Cecil Holmes (1921–1994) and the actor Chips Rafferty, in partnership with the director Lee Robinson (1923–2003), kept the industry alive with low budget action melodramas such as The Phantom Stockman (1953), King of the Coral Sea (1954), and Walk into Paradise (1956). This was a period dominated by overseas companies. The British made Smiley (1956), The Shiralee (1957), Robbery under Arms (1957), Smiley Gets His Gun (1958), and The Siege of Pinchgut (1959), while the Americans filmed The Kangaroo Kid (1950), Kangaroo (1952), Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1959), On the Beach (1959), Shadow of the Boomerang (1960), and The Sundowners (1960). The lack of regular film work meant that many Australian actors, such as Peter Finch (1916–1977), Ron Randell (1918–2005), John McCallum (b. 1917), Charles Tingwell (b. 1923), Grant Taylor (1917–1971), Guy Doleman (1923–1996), Michael Pate (b. 1920), Jeanette Elphick (1935–1988) (Victoria Shaw), and Reg Lye (1912–1988) left for either Britain or Hollywood.