Movie review – “Kangaroo” (1952) **1/2

After WW2, Hollywood made a number of films overseas, partly to take advantage of audience’s desire for location photography and new settings, partly to use funds frozen by currency restrictions. So film crews set forth from Los Angeles and criss crossed the globe; inevitably they set their eye Down Under. The resulting film was a big budgeted failure which doesn’t seem to be remembered with too much fondness. I have to say, though, I quite enjoyed it.

I think the main problem was it had a sort of melodramatic plot that audiences enjoyed in the 30s but didn't hold up as well after the war (rogues pretending to be someone’s long lost son, drunken fathers, a romance interrupted by fear of incest, etc).

Also the story is flawed – it gets off to a good start, with Peter Lawford and Richard Boone doing a con on Finlay Currie – but the stakes of that con aren’t very high (they should have had Lawford pretend to be Currie’s son from the outset, and have a police officer from Sydney come to track them down, or something – when the deception is revealed it doesn’t seem to mean much).

Things slow down during the middle with far too many tracking shots of cattle in swirling dust and Charles Tingwell’s ne’er-do-well, who you think is going to be this villain or wild-card element, is under-used. Oh, and the finale is a bit rushed, too, with O’Hara just tending Lawford in bed.

There is much to enjoy, though: colour photography, location work around Port Augusta, Lewis Milestone’s direction including his tracking shots (even though Milestone professed to dislike the result), Richard Boone’s excellent performance as a smooth-talking villain (ruthless but not unsympathetic), Maureen O’Hara doing her feisty-big-breasted-farmer’s-daughter-who-just-needs-taming routine, the opening credit sequence where you get your Aussie fix straight away by having (a) kangaroos hop around a homestead (b) Maureen O’Hara smile at a cockatoo (c) Maureen O’Hara chat with Chips Rafferty); a dust storm sequence where Lawford rescues Boone from a windmill, and an exciting whip duel between Lawford and Boone at the end.

Peter Lawford, while being a handsome OK actor with an interesting private life, lacks in the charisma department (he has a wishy washy character – kind of a scamp but not really, who goes along with what Richard Boone suggests – but someone like Bill Holden or Clarke Gable could have made it work) So a half-success... but not the dud history seems to have consigned it.

NB Apparently the film is in the public domain - it's downloadable here.