It’s commonly known as 'the race that stops a nation’. In its nearly 150-year history, it’s not surprising that the Melbourne Cup has been the centrepiece of some notable films.
The most famous is arguably Phar Lap (1983), directed by Simon Wincer. Its release in 1983 was a big event; at that time, one of the most expensive and hyped Australian films, it still ranks just outside the top 20 of Australian box-office successes (with figures unadjusted for inflation, see Get the Picture). The early eighties was a time of grand mythologising of Australian history, with Wincer’s film completing a trilogy of sorts, following Gallipoli (1981, also scripted by David Williamson) and The Man from Snowy River (1982, also starring Tom Burlinson as a heroic horseman).
Phar Lap was the favourite for the Cup in three successive years (1929-31), a first, and won the race in spectacular fashion in 1930. You can see Wincer’s crowd-pleasing re-creation of the race in Phar Lap, clip 3.
Some of the last moving images of Phar Lap in Australia feature in The Mighty Conqueror, a short documentary from 1931. Watch the clips to see strapper Tommy Woodcock, trainer Harry Telford and jockey Jimmy Pike (all key characters in Wincer’s film), as well as Phar Lap rolling in the sand and chasing Woodcock for some sugar! This short was directed by the pioneering McDonagh sisters, who made four features in the 1920s and early 1930s.
The earliest footage on this site – arguably Australia’s oldest surviving film – is of the Melbourne Cup 1896. The Cup was first run in 1861, and has been a public holiday in Melbourne since 1877, so was a fixture on the national calendar by 1896. The Bulletin remarked of Frenchman Marius Sestier’s footage that it was 'beautifully appropriate … that the first Australian picture presented by the new [Lumiere Cinématographe] should be a horse race’. You can compare the top hats and parasols of 1896 with the Australasian Gazette – 1924 Melbourne Cup newsreel montage of highlights from that year’s race.
In the wake of Phar Lap’s success and suspicious death in 1932, the Melbourne Cup is the focus of two very different 1930s box-office hits. In A Ticket in Tatts (1934), comedian George Wallace plays a hapless stablehand whose favoured horse wins the Cup. Like Woodcock, Wallace’s character sleeps with his horse to guard it from would-be assassins. Curator Paul Byrnes speculates that the film includes footage from the 1932 or ’33 Melbourne Cup. Thoroughbred is a 1936 melodrama from Ken G Hall which also has similarities to the Phar Lap story: a skinny horse arrives from New Zealand, only to confound the expectations of his doubters by winning the Melbourne Cup and becoming the greatest racehorse in Australia.
If you’re prepared to travel, you can see Phar Lap’s hide at Museum Victoria, his skeleton at Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, New Zealand, and his heart at the National Museum of Australia. See more ASO titles tagged horses.
