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Clip description
Ida (Deborah Kerr) has persuaded her husband to inquire about a job shearing sheep. In the contractor’s office, Paddy (Robert Mitchum) tries his best to avoid getting hired but Quinlan (Chips Rafferty) takes him on. He also has jobs for Sean (Michael Anderson Junior) and Mr Venneker (Peter Ustinov), their new stockman, but Quinlan draws the line at hiring a woman cook. Bluey Brown (John Meillon) has to remind Quinlan that the men choose the cook. They call a hasty union meeting and decide to give Ida an audition. Mrs Firth (Glynis Johns) hosts the test meal at her hotel, using her finest china.
Curator’s notes
The film has a rich sense of comedy throughout, most of which is pitched as a question of the power struggles within a marriage. Ida is constantly testing the limits of her own authority in relation to Paddy; in this scene, she takes that question to a wider theatre. First she has to convince the shearing contractor, then a unionised group of men who are traditionally resistant to a woman’s intrusion in their world. These sorts of dramatic and comedic situations were a staple in American westerns, and Fred Zinnemann had some experience in this area, having made High Noon in 1952. The same sorts of conflicts were familiar to Australian women, especially after the Second World War, when many had occupied jobs they had to relinquish to returned soldiers.
Jon Cleary may have been writing about the 1920s but his audience was reading in the 1950s, when the question of what women could do outside home, family and children was a growing debate. Much of the second half of the film is concerned very directly with the place of women – not just Ida, but the pregnant Liz Brown (Lola Brooks) and the unhappy wife of the station owner, Jean Halstead (Dina Merrill). It’s clear that Zinnemann was making The Sundowners partly as what was then called 'a women’s picture’. The inclusion of action (the bushfire), gambling and several fight scenes were just as clearly aimed at male viewers. Like most Hollywood movies of the time, it was conceived as an all-round entertainment, not just in terms of gender but nationalities (hence the casting of Peter Ustinov, an already popular figure in Britain).
