Marie Lorraine (actually the sister of the writer-director and producer-set designer) meets Paul Longuet on a train, heading to their home in the same town. He has just graduated from college, and is heading to meet his father, the government's legal expert in town. She's going home to meet her father, Gaston Mervale -- she s raised abroad by her estranged mother, who has died. She doesn't know that he is an evil-doer whom Longuet's father has been trying to convict for years. Longuet's father is sympathetic. Miss Lorraine's forbids the couple from associating and when he kills his sidekick, played by Arthur Maclaglen, takes his daughter to live in exile while he drinks himself to death.
A writer whose opinion I respect likes the movie and holds that the McDonaghs' being self-taught is cause to forgive what I perceive as the movie's infelicities, I don't think so. Any work of art, and that includes movies, must be judged on the standards of "does it move me?" If so, is it because of something innate to the movie, or is it something about the circumstances under which I saw it? If my love of a movie is purely nostalgic, or based on the fact that I knew no better at the time, like looking at Jimmy Aubrey before I had heard of Charlie Chaplin, then my initial appraisal is subject to revision. This movie was produced to appeal to an audience by raising in them certain emotions. Clearly it did at the time -- it was, by all reports, enormously successful. But was that success based on artistic merit, or the fact that it was an Australian production? Is patriotism relevant, except when producing a flag-waver of some sort?
I think not, and the simple characters or perhaps poor direction displease me in this movie. My beef is with Gaston Mervale. He's a rotter through and through, yet he is supposed to have charmed Miss Lorraine's mother away from Paul Longuet's father, and has maintained a place in society to cover his unspecified crimes; he also has to convince Miss Lorraine he is a wronged man, and to give up the man she loves to come slave for him in the outback for years. That calls for charm, at least some of the time -- he can reveal his rotten nature to his conspirator McLaglen. Yet he never shows any to anyone, just a mean, selfish, nasty nature. This makes him a hissable villain but it plays hob with the story.
This doesn't mean there's nothing of value in the movie. There's little doubt that Miss Lorraine is a capable actress, or that writer-director Pauline McDonough doesn't has a keen eye for an outdoor shot. She certainly does, from the overhead shot of the train hurtling over a bridge to the fields of Paradise Valley. The basic story remains good. It's simply that the handling of it has aged very badly.
