Share
Clip description
Mrs Chedworth (Rita Pauncefort) has chosen a new house befitting the social status to which she aspires – with statues and grand windows through which the neighbours can see her parties. Mr Chedworth (Cecil Kellaway) is disturbed at the speed of her spending and the lack of any say for himself. He tries in vain to assert his desire for carpet, rather than stained floors. His eldest daughter Gwen (Joan Deering) tells her father he has changed. Mr Chedworth is pleased to hear it, but he still ends up on his hands and knees, staining the floors.
Curator’s notes
Rita Pauncefort’s performance as Mrs Chedworth is very effective, but it’s a savage characterisation. Mrs Chedworth is a monstrously demanding woman, with huge pretensions, very little polish (note the way she murders French words, such as 'distingué’ and 'boudoir’) and vulgar sensibilities – a lower-middle class nouveau riche snob, in fact. The original novel was by an English writer, and the class-consciousness remains very English. That was easy to transplant to an Australian setting because the program of mass migration to Australia had not yet begun. Australian audiences still saw themselves, by and large, as British. Mr Chedworth’s accent is as British as his wife’s affected 'posh’ accent in this scene.
Cinesound films were made with an eye (and an ear) to getting a release in British cinemas. Most of the films were seen in Britain, this one opening there in late 1939. At the same time, Ken Hall often threw in an American actor or two, playing their own nationality, and presumably for a similar reason – to help with an American sale. These were much less common, for all Australian filmmakers of the time, not just Ken Hall. In a very real sense he was working in an Australian industry suspended between two bigger and more powerful cultures. The films reflect Australia’s wider geopolitics at the time – a British past, an American future. The coming war would make that more explicit, even as it killed off most Australian film production.
The joke about Cecil de Milo is a reference to the American film director Cecil B DeMille, who was probably the most famous director in the world in the early 1930s.
