Kangarù

You look at this cast, Peter Lawford, Maureen O'Hara, Chips Rafferty, Richard Boone and Finlay Currie, and you'd think this would be a winner. Well, not quite. The story line which draws on the fortunes of an Irish immigrant (Currie) and his daughter (O'Hara)to rural Australia just kind of wears out. Boone, of course, is at his hammy best as the bad guy and Lawford, in his pre-Ratpack days, provides the romantic interest but the story just seems to run out of steam, even with the efforts of veteran Aussie character actor, Chips Rafferty. If it shows up one night on the late show, you might want to watch it but I doubt if you'll remember much of it afterwards.

"Kangaroo" is an unusual film because it was made by Hollywood...on location in Australia. However, oddly, the stars are all Brits or Irish or Americans!

When the story begins, two crooks, Richard and John (Peter Lawford and Richard Boone), meet up and decide to fleece a nice old guy (Finlay Currie). However, as the film progresses, the nicer of the two crooks has second thoughts.

The problems for me are that the story never is very interesting and both leading men were awful....so I had a hard time caring for either. Overall, a mildly interesting time passer, and it's in color, but otherwise uninspired.

Peter Lawford and Richard Boone are two criminals who befriend on old drunk (Finley Currie) who turns out to be the rancher father of Maureen O'Hara who's been looking for him for two weeks. All this takes place, and entirely filmed, in the wonderful outback of Australia where you see the Aborigines dance for rain, kangaroos hopping, and flocks of birds flying around. Plenty of exciting scenes of stampede herding of steer and windmill stopping and fights between Lawford and Boone. One part I wasn't too crazy about was one when O'Hara and Lawford were about to kiss in the middle scene since Peter was supposedly passing himself off as the long-lost son of her father! Good thing it didn't happen then! Pretty good direction from old pro Lewis Milestone. Worth a look for old-time movie buffs.

"Kangaroo" is a decent film once you get past the lame title. There's hardly a kangaroo to be seen in the movie, but it seems the producers of this big-budget film shot on location in Australia wanted something to say "exotic" right away, and why take a chance misspelling "koala bear"?

Not otherwise much different from the types of films they called Westerns and made by the score in Hollywood in the 1950s, "Kangaroo" features Peter Lawford and Richard Boone playing a pair of outlaws, on the run after killing a no-good gambling-hall owner. They find themselves able to make their escape by pretending to have bought a herd of cattle from an old rancher with a drinking problem (Finlay Currie). And if the rancher happens to think one of them is his long-lost son, what's the harm in indulging him for some extra security?

Having low expectations of both Boone and especially Lawford going in, I was pleasantly surprised at how well the two anchored the proceedings as gritty, amoral partners of circumstance. Boone has a fun time playing a devil-may-care type with a deep vocabulary who makes his philosophy clear early on: "I never feel any regrets. I died years ago...To live, one must first die."

The two even manage to launder their bloody booty by giving it to the rancher and pretending its their payment to him in exchange for cattle. What if the cattle die, from a long-standing drought now gripping the whole region? Well, it's better than a noose for this pair, and as a game of chance, it's no worse a bet than any other either man has taken on in recent months.

Lawford's Richard Connor is the conscience of the pair, a solid backboard for the proceedings as Boone gnashes on the hammy script for all its worth. He has a hard time reconciling himself to pretending to be the rancher's long-lost son, especially after he gets a load of the rancher's other sibling Dell (Maureen O'Hara).

O'Hara is only okay here, a far cry from the light of so many John Ford movies shot around the same time. Director Lewis Milestone is himself no slouch, he shot "All Quiet On The Western Front" and gets value both from the location shoots and isolated moments like when a few raindrops plink down on dusty ground.

"Kangaroo" offers a ripping set-up, and in sequences like a long cattle drive where parched cows attract crows while the cattle drivers wait in vain for rain, you feel the desperation of the story and its main characters right in your guts. Perhaps I was the victim of a poorly-edited cut, but my 85-minute version of the movie feels otherwise gruesomely truncated, especially when a sudden whipfight breaks out in the last five minutes and is resolved by an off-camera gunshot. Not a way to end a movie!

Still, there's more to like than not to like here, even if the plot feels at times lamely stretched to take in such vintage Australian elements as aborigines and boomerangs. Everyone wears a Crocodile Dundee hat, too. Yet there's a charm to all this, too, in Hollywood's first movie shot in Australia playing like a Randolph Scott western with a bigger budget and more ambitious cinematography.

The biggest problem is the truncated sense of time; one can imagine the film going a little longer in certain directions, fleshing out story lines that seem to wither here. Maybe it did, and I was only the victim of a cheap DVD transfer. I liked "Kangaroo" enough to enjoy the better parts and not sweat the weaker stuff so much. Not great, as I said, but decent entertainment.

Kangaroo which is the title of this first Hollywood production shot in Australia has this title if for no other reason than to give the movie-going public an identifiable Aussie image. It could have been entitled duck billed platypus and I wish they'd featured one or two of those in the film. As it was there weren't all that many kangaroos to see.

Maureen O'Hara actually fought to get into this film according to her memoirs and then regretted it. She liked the original script as a straightforward Aussie western and looked forward to the trip. Darryl Zanuck was going to cast his current mistress in the part, but Maureen talked him into using her.

However once she got to Australia the story was changed to include an incest angle that she found abhorrent. Part of the plot involved a pair of confidence men and robbers played by Peter Lawford and Richard Boone to lead Maureen's father Finlay Currie into believing Lawford is his long lost son. It wasn't real necessary to the story in my opinion either.

The fact that this was a first Hollywood production there and that any disharmony might have caused an international incident between the USA and Australia kept her from walking off the set. Not that there weren't problems with her co-stars, both Lawford and Boone she says treated her badly, especially after they were caught in a nasty scandal there that never saw the light of day until her memoirs.

On the other hand the scenes on the Australian outback are nicely done and when all is said and done, the film is just an average western set in the land down under.

The next Hollywood production shot there was The Sundowners and while star Robert Mitchum had his problems with the Aussie press also, The Sundowners is a light years better film than Kangaroo.