Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows pioneer Australian filmmaker Ken G Hall speaking directly to camera about the making of the 1932 film On Our Selection and about the effect of the film on his career. Hall says that he was initially reluctant to make the film, but was won over by the commercial sensibilities of writer–performer Bert Bailey and exhibitor Stuart Doyle. Hall pays tribute to Bailey and describes the financial success and ongoing popularity of the film and the difficulties of production. He also talks about the advantages of film compared to theatre.

Educational value points

• Ken Hall (1901–94) highlights the challenge for filmmakers who balance creative instincts and the need for a film to have popular appeal. He acknowledges Bert Bailey’s (1868–1953) ‘showman’ instincts, which contributed to the extraordinary success of On Our Selection, Hall’s first feature film. Hall says that the success of the film launched his career and established the production company Cinesound as a leader of the Australian film industry.

• The dominant themes in On Our Selection proved popular with audiences at a time of great hardship and uncertainty, when Australia was emerging from the Great Depression. The film was a major box office success and earned ten times its production cost. The reasons for the success included the emphasis on and idealisation of Australia’s rural landscape and the national identity of Australians as rugged, determined and independent ‘battlers’.

• As Hall recalls in this clip, he adapted Bailey and Edmund Duggan’s stage play by adding action to their script. He says that he 'let light and air’ into the source material by including outdoor scenes such as horseraces. The early 1930s was a time of transition, and Hall was able to demonstrate the opportunities that film offered to texts that had previously been limited by the physical dimensions of the stage.

• On Our Selection reflected a trend in the nascent Australian film industry for relying on adaptations of well-known texts. As with earlier successful Australian films, such as The Sentimental Bloke (1919) and For the Term of His Natural Life (1927), On Our Selection was derived from a popular established text. Bailey and Duggan’s play had been adapted from popular 1890s stories by Steele Rudd, the pen-name of Arthur Hoey Davis (1868–1935).

• Hall mentions the production limitations faced by the filmmakers because of poor resources and primitive technical equipment. The antiquated equipment used in the filming reflected the prohibitive cost and limited availability of specialist sound-compatible systems. The reluctance to source new equipment was partly a result of the then industry goal of churning out cheap populist content.

• On Our Selection launched Ken Hall’s distinguished career in the Australian film industry. The success of the film helped establish him as a leading producer, director and executive. He revitalised the local film industry and introduced the latest practices from Hollywood, including building Cinesound Studios on a vertically integrated model as a producer, distributor, promoter and exhibitor of films, and using modern editing techniques such as the wipe effect.

Pioneer Australian filmmaker Ken G Hall is interviewed speaking direct to camera.
Ken G Hall And we began to make On Our Selection. Now, Bert Bailey had written that with Edmund Duggan back in 1912. And it had been an enormous success on the stage all over Australia. I, being young and a bit silly, thought we should be making something better, you know. But Doyle the showman, and Bailey with his knowledge of the public, were on the right track. I was wrong, they were dead right.

This film, which was crudely made in many ways, because we had no equipment – we were working with all kinds of old lighting equipment and silent camera, covered up with blankets and stuff – it was a very difficult thing. The crew had nothing to work with. But the film in the theatre caused people to fall out of their seats. The laughed their heads off, even though we were in the middle of the worst Depression that had ever happened. It ran nine weeks in the Capitol Theatre, which held 2,700 seats. It was nearly filling the theatre at every session, four times a day. Now, that film was still running 25 years later. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a copy round the country now still holding it up.

On Our Selection founded Cinesound, founded my career, and I’ll forever bless Bailey with his comedy genius, because I learned so much from him. I adapted his old play to the screen. I wrote the screenplay, and let light and air into it that they couldn’t do on the stage. I could have horseraces, I could have all sorts of things like that, which we did. And I invented a lot of comedy. But Bert always insisted we didn’t interfere with the comedy that was on the old script, and he was right. Bert Bailey was one of the greatest people I’ve ever known, and he was my friend right up to his death at the age of 84.