Okay wow so yeah, uh.... Terry Bourke's output is... variable. This is a melodrama best known for its opening sequence which dramatises the killing of the Balibo Five. Only here it's the Balibo Seven - two brothers, Chard Hayward and Ivar Kants, actually survive and have PTSD. Kants settles down in a New Zealand town with Alyson Best and Haywood wants him to go back to journalism.
That's not a bad set up. But the result is a mess, growing increasingly campy as it goes along, with Hayward having a fling with a local girl and getting beaten up and they break up and he's with Jennifer Cluff and the local girl has a break town and turns into a hooker and tries to kill herself and has a break down and the town hate Hayward and there's a gang who want to beat up Hayward and Kants does it and then there's a bus crash and...
Anyway a lot happens. Not much to do with the Balibo Five.
In fairness the plot is not worse than the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink efforts of say MGM in the 30s which were pushed over by having Clark Gable and Jen Harlow in it (the non classics, of which there were plenty, people just forget them). This doesn't have quite the same star power - no knock on Hayward he just, uh, isn't Clark Gable. (Having him do karate was perhaps particularly unfortunate). It's his film - and Margaret Laurence's - more than Kants. I think maybe they should've leant into Hayward and Kants more.
Is the bus crash based on a famous bus crash? The woman being impaled by a log is pretty funny.
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