Table Talk: Bob Ellis on Film and Theatre

A tale of young men maddened by war; of mud and shelling and fright and high explosives; of mateship, self-sacrifice and bonded memory; of a village wooing and letters home from the front; of stupid Anglicised officers and wily working class larrikins and the biggest man-made explosion thus far in world history; of death unsought and evaded and the friendship of men that goes deep and beyond words.

It’s Beneath Hill 60, the best Australian film thus far (even Samson and Delilah is a little worse), the best film on World War One I’ve seen, just finished in a cinema near you. And I nearly missed it too.

And I understand mateship at last, and Anzac Day, and that convocation of ugly bibulous loyalty the RSL in the 1940s that my father went to once a week. I realise what was lost in bluster and booze and never retrieved.

As the multiculture advances and the Anzac-unanimity recedes into myth and verse and song and caricature, it’s worth seeing, I think, at last, how it was back then, up close. Men shamed by white feathers into joining up though they knew they could die of that shame. Men asking the girl’s father if they can write to her from the front. Educated, literate working class men huddled underground and thinking about things as the war-noise nears. Men who could write a rhymed verse, dig a trench, mourn a comrade, question a deity, curse a Pom, improvise a lethal explosive device, lose their minds in the roar of battle and piss themselves laughing, dead in their tens of thousands, the gene pool bereft of their excellence, gone for good.

Our Jack Dempsey died in that war, our Bing Crosby, Charles Chaplin, George Gershwin, TE Lawrence, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walt Disney, that War of Three Cousins that never should have been authorised and never should have been fought. It was the willed, consensual suicide of the best of Europe and the British colonies that gave America world mastery, Hitler the nod and Stalinism seventy years of menace, paranoia and expensive wasted rocketry.

It should never have been authorised and should never have been fought. The Islamicists will beat us now, because we were so traumatised by those trenches, mud and noise. The dead cry out to us from our cenotaphs and we hear them still, and we will never, never fight a war as big or as hard again.

Jeremy Hartley Sims, David Roach and Bill Leimbach made the film for ten million dollars, one-fiftieth of what we paid all up for Baz’s dumb-arsed Australia (enough to sustain seventy small theatre companies for a thousand years on the interest alone), or this is what I hear. It introduces a new star Brendan Cowell, who in equal parts resembles Colin Friels, Russell Crowe, Jack Thompson and (aptly) Richard Todd, and can act as well as them all put together, plus the electrifying Steve Le Marquand who is Australia’s Sean Connery, and a gang of muddy-faced blokes (Harrison Gilbertson, Guyton Grantley, Anthony Hayes, Alex Thompson, Alan Dukes), two of them playing father and son, joined up together for mutual comfort, you soon feel you’ve known all your life.

Seven of them are still alive at the end, in a wedding photo, one of them gibbering mad, the others holding it in, the bride smiling bravely, knowing what’s coming to her in the next forty years of nocturnal screaming and smashed furniture. And we see it all in that photo.

We meet some Germans too, dedicated and decent in the same way as our boys, with muddied postcards from home and faces very similar to the Aussies we have come to know. We numbly cheer both sides on as we might at a football game while simultaneously knowing there’s no sense to it, no purpose, no good end, only ingenuity and bravery and horror and suspense like that in The Hurt Locker, a Homeric joust with Death the only victor.

It’s a gang-show, like Sunday Too Far Away, The Odd Angry Shot, The Club, Stir and Gallipoli with males predominating as they do in Shakespeare’s best play Henry IV Part One. And one wonders if this is the natural Australian style, a mob of blokes up against it and joshing one another as they go over the wire and perish needlessly in a stupid cause. A memory of our convict past perhaps, when there weren’t many women and our primary friendship were with the mob, the unit, the road gang, the old gang, the comrades, the mates.

Unlike all other war films with muddy faces you can work out who is who. Not much is said but the spaces round the words, the looks exchanged, the memories channelled, the words repressed, are vivid and resonant. As a film director Hartley Sims resembles most not Richard Attenborough nor John Ford nor John Huston nor Bruce Beresford nor Fred Schepisi nor Clint Eastwood but William Wyler, whose spacious pauses and assessing looks exalted The Best Years of Our Lives (about American servicemen coming home) into cinema Valhalla and what might be called the memory of the tribe. It’s the best American film even now (with Flags Of Our Fathers a close second) as this is the best Australian one.

And the design of course and the special effects are exemplary. It’s a pity you’ll never now experience this film as I did (you have to be in a cinema to share the claustrophobia) but that’s how it is with the movies these days in this, the golden age: in, out, good reviews, no audience, bad luck, next. Yet I note it anyway as a great act of unashamed, nationalist regret and pride and grieving, like ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ and The Sentimental Bloke whose tunes of glum glory will outlive our agnosticism and cynicism and sarcasm and deck with wattle our proud passing as a culture.