2007 Program - Reviews, credits and stills

Hunt Angels

Credits:

  • Alec Morgan .... Director
  • Alec Morgan .... Screenwriter
  • Ben Mendelsohn .... Rupert Kathner
  • Victoria Hill .... Alma Brooks
  • Gary Boulter .... Bleary Producer
  • Peter Hansen .... Bathhouse Man
  • Eloise Oxer
  • Greg Poppleton .... Film Lab Clerk
  • Michael Powell .... Young Bren Brown

Melbourne Film Festival Review

2007 Melbourne Film Festival

A dark and dangerous episode in Australiafs cinema history is vibrantly reanimated and reinterpreted through Hunt Angels. Using innovative digital composite techniques never before utilised in an Australian feature film, director Alec Morgan and visual effects specialist Rose Draper blend 1930s Australia with the cinematic fantasy worlds of their imaginative main characters in what is a valentine to cinema and the mavericks who sometimes went unnoticed.

Hunt Angels is the true story of film industry outlaws Rupert Kathner and Alma Brooks, who began a movie-making spree that took on Hollywood barons, a police commissioner and the cultural cringe, all in their passionate pursuit to make Australian films. On the run from the police across thousands of miles, they would stop at almost nothing to get their films made. Ben Mendelsohn stars with newcomer Victoria Hill in this celebration of the survival of Australian national cinema in the face of Hollywoodfs cultural imperialism. Dedicated to anyone who has ever fought for their dreams.

   

 

Review by Sandra Hall, SMH

November 22, 2006 SMH Review

Elegantly engaging hybrid docudrama about a pair of filmmakers on the run

Failures often make the best stories. If you have ever doubted it, try this film. It's about Rupert Kathner, who occupies a previously obscure place in the history of Australian filmmaking as an artistic outlaw. He was so consumed with his passion for pictures that the obligations and practicalities of real life faded into irrelevance.

Hence his undoing.

His heyday, if you can call it that, was in Sydney during the 1930s and '40s, when he and his producing partner, Alma Brooks - who was also his lover - cranked out 13 newsreels and six features. They also dreamed up ingenious methods of improvisation as backers backed out, budgets evaporated and the police pursued them, urged on by their irate creditors.

Alec Morgan, the writer-director of Hunt Angels, had never heard of them until seven years ago, when he happened on a print of one of their films while researching something else. It was their account of a notorious 1934 murder, the Pyjama Girl case, and it so impressed him that he had to know more.

The result is an elegantly engaging hybrid of a film which matches scenes from the pair's pictures with archival footage of the Sydney of 70 years ago. These have been grafted onto the dramatised story of their lives and embellished with the reminiscences of those who knew them. It's all done in black and white and hums with the energy of an old-fashioned tabloid. This was an era when the term hard-boiled still had a topical edge to it, and Kathner looks as if he tried hard to fit the description, but his natural enthusiasm kept getting in the way.

Kathner is played by Ben Mendelsohn, whose voice, with its gravelly depths, is perfect for the part, as is his face. It's the kind that goes well with the suits and hats of the period and it suggests good-naturedness - which also seems right, since those who remember Kathner usually wear a smile. His son, Paul, who also appears, is less amused, for he and his mother, Clarice (Eloise Oxer), became the casualties of this husband and father's life in movies.

While Kathner and Brooks were out trying to realise their screen dreams, Clarice and Paul were at home eking out the housekeeping money. It's a poignantly ironic sequel to scenes evoking the Kathners' courtship, for they're directed with a fond nod to the movie romances of the day.

Brooks is played by Victoria Hill as a slender dynamo who possesses most of the partnership's entrepreneurial know-how. She is the one who chases up investors, as well as operating the camera, co-writing the scripts and acting in the films if the budget doesn't stretch to a professional, which is much of the time.

The highlight of her adventures with Kathner is the making of the Pyjama Girl film. Newsreel coverage of the case had been banned by William MacKay, the then police commissioner, but this decision only serves as a spur to Kathner and Brooks. First they sneak into the laboratory in Sydney University's medical faculty where the embalmed body is being stored in a zinc-lined coffin pending identification.

When the filming goes awry for want of an extra light bulb, they finish by mocking up the scene in the bathroom at home with Brooks doubling for the corpse. Mack Sennett might well have been presiding over much of their career.

Slapstick certainly rules when Kathner is reduced to playing multiple roles in a sadly truncated wartime epic. The same spirit powers his Ned Kelly film, The Glenrowan Affair.

He played so many roles on that one that he took as one of his credits the pseudonym Hunt Angels. The angels were the investors and he was always on the hunt for them. He was hardly a hero to those left floundering in his wake but in evoking him from a safe distance of several decades - and doing it with such flair - Morgan has turned him into a rediscovered treasure.

Rating:

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