![]() ![]() (Perhaps not surprisingly, it bombed overseas. They're a Weird Mob played to sellout audiences at the State for six months, and made over $2 million at the Australian box office nationally. Just as importantly, its financial success revealed that Australian audiences would pay to watch local films – if given the chance. It showed that Australia had actors and technicians talented enough to make films. What we would call today a "co-pro" – partly funded with money from overseas – it was one of the very few Australian feature films that actually got made in the 1960s. Though it wasn't the best film ever to grace the screen at the State, They're a Weird Mob contributed significantly to the idea that an Australian film industry revival was neither a fanciful idea nor a national folly. ![]() "We were starved for seeing something of ourselves," he tells me, "even if it was a bit ocker." Now retired from film-making, he went on to become the award-winning producer of films like Caddie and Bliss. Buckley doesn't rate the film highly, but he remembers it fondly. He was working for the newsreel company Cinesound, helping to capture for posterity the damp celebrities on the red carpet. A little bit of Hollywood hoopla had come to Market Street.Īlso in the audience that night was a budding filmmaker in his twenties called Anthony Buckley. After the film was shown that night 50 years ago, Drynan joined her older, more experienced cast mates up on stage: Chiari, Chips Rafferty, Ed Devereaux and Slim de Grey. There was lots of excitement about this film," she told me recently by phone from her home in Los Angeles. Today, after a long and illustrious acting career, she is best remembered for her roles in classic Australian films like Don's Party and Muriel's Wedding. Fresh out of NIDA, she played Betty, the newlywed wife of Nino's friend, Jimmy. ![]() Standing nervously backstage that night, "freshly made up with big hair and lots of eye make-up" and wearing a pair of fashionable culottes bought specially for the occasion, was a teenaged Jeanie Drynan. Reading the book today, you have to consciously remind yourself that it, and the film, were released at a time when Italian migrants would have been referred to in polite circles as "New Australians" but in the nation's public bars they were "wogs", "dagoes" and "eyeties". Nino never encounters prejudice he is accepted easily into Australian society because he accepts so easily its habits of speech and thought. They're a Weird Mob had something of a galvanising effect on the Australian film industry.īesides its humour, the book probably found favour with Australian readers because it portrayed them in such a flattering light. Published in 1957, it sold in its millions. It's a benign portrait of the migrant experience in Australia, and gently mocks the nation's dominant Anglo-Saxon suburbanite culture. In spite of the weather, They're a Weird Mob was being launched onto the world stage in some style.īased on the bestselling novel by a former pharmacist called John O'Grady (writing under the pseudonym Nino Culotta), They're a Weird Mob tells the – ever so slightly satirical – story of an Italian journalist's encounter with the strange manners, language and rituals of postwar Australia. Foreign glamour arrived in the shape of the movie's star, the Italian actor and comedian Walter Chiari. Amid flashing bulbs, local celebrities and dignitaries tramped up a sodden red carpet. But on a wet winter's night back in 1966, when it was solely a movie house, a film that would help reactivate Australia's moribund motion picture industry held its premiere there. Today, this glorious temple to cinema hosts music, ballet, stand-up comedians and the annual Sydney Film Festival. Built in 1929, it seats more than 2000 patrons in the faux classical opulence favoured in the early 20th century by the designers of picture palaces. For that old-style Jaffa-rolling movie experience, you can't go past the State Theatre in Sydney's Market Street. ![]()
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