The Man from Down Under

I've seen this film several times and always enjoy it. The plots, combining drama and comedy, action and romance, are certainly unusual, especially the Reed/Carlson/McNally "incest" triangle. Charles Laughton and Binny Barnes have great chemistry together as do Donna Reed and Richard Carlson.

I wouldn't really know how to summarize the plot of The Man from Down Under, since it doesn't really know what type of movie it wants to be. It's a family drama, a romantic comedy, a war movie, a boxing movie, a film of a reckless patriarch, and, just for good measure, they throw a bit of incest into the plot. If you think it would be fun to watch all those elements in one film, then by all means, rent it. Personally, I was glad when the end credits rolled.

Charles Laughton plays an Australian soldier returning home from World War One. Before he leaves France, he promises to marry Binnie Barnes, a local hooker, but he gets into a fistfight and forgets all about it. Then, he runs across two orphaned children, adopts them, and brings them back to Australia. Turns out, the kids aren't really brother and sister, and when they grow up-even though neither one is aware of that detail-they become attracted to one another. That part of the plot was seriously disturbing. Donna Reed and Richard Carlson play the adult children, and while neither one even tries to put on an accent, even if they had, their performances would still be laughably awful. Charles Laughton isn't bad-even though his idea of an Australian accent is a Cockney accent-but his character is so unlikable he gets on your nerves pretty quickly. I thought the movie would focus on the tenderness he feels for his children, but instead he sends his daughter off to boarding school and just teaches his son how to box. That's not very tender, and as he's shown as a manipulative, hot-headed gambler during the rest of the film, there's not much to root for.

While this is certainly not a great film, it is one of the better Allied propaganda films to come out of Hollywood during WWII. This story is unusual in that it concerns Aussies--a topic seldom covered in American pictures. Charles Laughton is sort of an "everyman" who you come to like. His life is going swimmingly until the Japanese attack. Forced to defend himself, his loved ones and his homeland, this ordinary guy rises to the occasion. I liked this because instead of a macho hero like Clark Gable or even Dana Andrews, Laughton is just so pudgy and ordinary that I think the message got across that war is won by the common people. A nice job of acting and writing--well worth watching.

The only thing that was unsettling about the film was the weird relationship between "brother and sister" Richard Carlson and Donna Reed. That was just plain creepy! Otherwise, a lot of fun...

I liked it. Your Australian viewer wrote, "Laughton gives the open, hearty, unsophisticated digger a valiant try but he's simply miscast. .." It was that bumbling, unsure-of-himself, yet hollow bravado that made us laugh. It was a scream.

Charles Laughton stars in MGM's tribute to our Australian allies in The Man From Down Under where he and no one else from the cast remotely sounds Australian. It could be excused however because Australia was still taking immigrants from all over the British Commonwealth and Laughton's cockney speech would have been among many different accents heard throughout the continent.

The story takes place with Sergeant Laughton in World War I obtaining custody of a couple of Belgian war orphans in Richard Carlson and Donna Reed or at least that's who they grew up to be down under. Purportedly they're brother and sister, but Carlson and Reed are feeling some unsettling attractions.

The film really does belong to Laughton as a lovable old braggart who runs a pub, parlays that into a hotel and loses it to the shrewd entertainer Binnie Barnes. Barnes is playing a part that normally Elsa Lanchester would have played opposite Laughton. There scenes together especially when she takes him at dice and cards are really the highlight of the film.

By the time things are done, Australia is in World War II and the film is good if for no other reason than to show contemporary audiences, especially American ones, just how close Australia came to invasion. The port of Darwin on the north coast was bombed as was the surrounding area from Japanese bases on New Guinea. It's a rather contrived plot that brings all the principal characters together to fight off a Japanese bomber crew that has crashed near the Laughton/Barnes hotel.

Hobart Cavanaugh and Arthur Shields have good roles as Laughton's sidekick and the local priest respectively. Cavanaugh and Laughton keep trying to steal scenes from each other and it's a hoot.

The Man From Down Under joins a pantheon of films like Under Capricorn and Green Dolphin Street and Sister Kenny which give the American view of Australia, from folks who've never been in the Southern Hemisphere. There are some establishing newsreel shots of the place, but the sets themselves? As the Aussies would say it, 'not even a bloody roo'.

Of course the film suffers from comparison with a film like The Fighting Rats Of Tobruk and Bush Christmas, two of the very few Australian productions that actually were released in America. Of course MGM certainly had better production facilities than Australia did at the time. But after you've seen some of their stuff, primitive though it might be, the American films just don't ring true.

Still The Man From Down Under is a sincere tribute to the fighting folks of Australia, civilian and military, and any chance to see Charles Laughton in any film should never be passed up.