Submitted by
Don Handley
They're a Weird Mob (1966)
Australian Cinema - The First Eighty Years
From: Australian Cinema - The First Eighty Years
By Graham Shirley and Brian Adams. 2nd ed 1989
From the cover:
Shirley is a researcher, writer and director of
documentaries on a broad spectrum of Australian
history.
Adams divides his time as a writer and television
producer between Australia and Europe.
They're a Weird Mob, a much-publicised "rebirth" of
Australian cinema, had been planned since the early
1960's. The initiators of the project were the British
producer-director Michael Powell and John McCallum,
then managing director of J. C. Williamson Ltd. A
third of the $600,000 budget came from the Rank
organisation, another third from Britain's National
Film Finance Corporation and the remainder from
Australian interests, principally J. C. Williamson
Ltd. The story, adapted from the 1957 novel by John
O'Grady under the pseudonym Nino Culotta, is about
Nino, an Italian immigrant, and his endeavours to
adjust to the rituals of mateship, learn enough local
slang to get by, and win the strong-minded daughter
of a building contractor. The script by "Richard
Imrie" (Powell's long-time collaborator Emeric
Pressburger) broadly caricatures Australians but
not without affection. Character focus is nowhere near
sharp enough to capture the consistent quirkiness of
the book, although the hard-working performance of
Walter Chiari as Nino manages to make an impact, but
only occasional inventiveness recalls the
Powell-Pressburger talent so strongly evident in their
earlier films AMOLAD (1946) and TRS (1948).
The commercial success of TAWM, which established an
unbeaten record at Sydney's large State Theatre, drew
heavily from the continuing popularity of the book
and attracted considerable publicity for what was,
after all, an unusual event - an Australian feature
film. Within a year, production grossed $A3 million
from Australian screenings alone but because of the
nature of WIlliamson-Powell's distribution agreement,
the producers had received only one-sixth of this
amount by the end of 1967, and would not recoup
production costs until 1974. The box office success,
coupled with Williamson-Powell's well-publicised
frustration over the distribution deal, led to its
prominence as a key film in the drive to re-establish
the (Australian) film industry with Government
support. Michael Thornhill wrote:
`When the Greater Union Theatre Group of companies and
the Rank Distributors are taking $A2,500,000 from
$A3,000,000 and the producers are left with $A500,000
the cards are really stacked against the independent
producer in Australia'.
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