Wherever She Goes

It is difficult to understand why the producers of this film decided to make a fictionalised account of the life of this world famous pianist.It is dreary and boring and does the pianist little favours.

Heavy-handed, dreadfully dreary somewhat fictionalized account of the young Eileen Joyce's introduction to the world of music, her subsequent passion for it and how she struggled against enormous odds to become proficient on the piano. Lack of support from her near-penniless parents did not help matters. Indeed, the story of her battles to procure a piano for practicing on were heart-rending.

Produced with very little humour, and imbued with an intense feeling of pathos throughout, this tear-jerker of a film was not fun to watch.

Having said all that, I have nothing but praise for the actress, Suzanne Parrett, who played the part of the young Eileen Joyce, and who acquitted herself very well indeed in an extremely negative role.

I would much prefer to have seen a biopic that treated Eileen's early life more superficially, and dealt with more of her later successful career as one of the most popular concert pianists of her time.

This is such a delightful film! Suzanne Parrett, as the young Eileen Joyce, is enchanting. This is a finely crafted film; the images, vernacular and social settings are iconic of Australia at that time, the middle 1920s. Each scene is beautifully composed and captures the landscape and characters perfectly. It is guaranteed to pull at your heartstrings as Eileen navigates through the minefield of adult skepticism in a tough economic environment. Hope is maintained by her meetings with a sympathetic swagman, an inspiring pianist in a piano shop and the rough but appreciative miners in Boulder. This wonderful film stands up there with A Bush Christmas, The Overlanders and Smiley as an Aussie classic.

This film certainly has rough edges, but this suits the depiction of the location at the time being portrayed. Most of the film was centred on the childhood of pianist Eileen Joyce. She lived in Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Western Australia, and at the time (some would say still) it was an isolated and rough mining area. Eileen's father was there to try to find a fortune in gold, but was actually very poor. The story is really about the struggles that the family and Eileen went through to develop Eileen's piano playing skills. The acting is adequate, without being exceptional, but this is not as important as the story, which is well presented. Some of the scenes of Eileen as a young girl actually 'playing' the harmonica and piano are very unconvincing. This can be forgiven as the audience is primarily there to be informed, rather than be entertained in the conventional filmic sense. The only real criticism I have is that the film ends too soon. I learned that Eileen Joyce went through a lot to actually become famous, but I learned nothing about what she did to become as famous as she did. The viewer gets the feeling that the production company ran out of money, so the bulk of Eileen Joyce's life was dealt with in about a minute of celluloid - lots of the old newspaper headlines ploy! Overall, this is a good film, and well worth watching. I rated it 7 out of 10.

I thought it was a great old Aussie classic, while it lacked the production of some more modern movies (apart from the special effects of the upside down camera shot towards the end) at least the camera people could hold the camera still enough to capture the dialogue and action. I saw some great old Aussie characters, some fantastic nostalgic palaverous dialogue and scenery that would be adored by Australians as they would, could and should. I see it as one of those stepping stones for the Aust film industry that has now made classic after classic. It's a bonza.