This was an 1893 play from WJ Lincoln rewritten by Dampier to great acclaim in 1901, and which formed the basis of a 1911 (now lost) silent film. It's an enjoyable bushranger melodrama, featuring many common aspects of the time - a handsome hero (Edgar) who doesn't get along with his rich land-owning father; the father is is killed by the hero's villainous cousin, determined to get hold of the family property; hero is wrongly accused of the crime and is convicted of murder (shades of For the Term of His Natural Life), but escapes and becomes a bushranger, Captain Midnight. He romances a squatter's daughter as "Charles Fenton" (shades of Robbery Under Arms), despite being loved by Elsa, faithful daughter of Edgar's old friend Ned. He falls out with the bushrangers he's meant to be leading, and despite a jealous Elsa betraying him, manages to put away the bad guys and be reunited with the woman he loves.
There's a lot that's good about this - the set up is simple and clear, the characters are well motivated, and it's full of incident and action (much of which is inevitably described - eg Edgars's escape from gaol - but a bit of it we see eg rescuing Elsa from the hands of the villains). You can easily see why it would have made a good movie - there's several escapes and chases on horse back plus shoot outs and romance.
The best thing about it is the terrific character of Elsa, the brave woman who loves Edgar, constantly putting her life on the line for his (she even pretends to be Captain Midnight on horseback to draw police fire away from him), even though he loves another, being torn by jealousy and betraying him but changing her mind. I didn't mind her drunken bushman father Ned (created by Dampier to give himself a role) and the comic youngsters Wattie and Tottie (reading it you can see that in the right hands these parts would have been effective), plus a great line up of villains: evil cousin Vincent, his aristocratic partner in crime Stirling, the dodgy Joe, nasty bushranger Tom.
But there's a lot of problems. Much of the plotting is dodgy, Midnight is a lousy bushranger (he hardly robs anyone before having pangs of conscience), the character of Thelma (the squatter's daughter, Edgar's true love) is practically nothing and feels introduced too late, Edgar/Fenton/Midnight has hardly more complexity or interest and he doesn't do that much heroic stuff - Elsa seems far braver. He also doesn't clear his name - that's up to Joe turning evidence and the efforts of the police. The final wedding sequence feels like padding.
Still any skilled adapted would have fixed this in a screenplay and it's a shame no enterprising film company shot this in the 1930s.
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