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Clip description
Smiley (Keith Calvert) arrives home with Sergeant Flaxman (Chips Rafferty). His mother (Margaret Christensen) thinks he’s in trouble again, but the policeman explains their new deal: if Smiley can be of good behaviour long enough to get eight nicks on a tree, awarded by the Sergeant, he will earn a .22 rifle. His father (Reg Lye) says he’ll never make it but a visiting water-bore driller, Stiffy (Grant Taylor), thinks he can do it. They make a secret wager.
Curator’s notes
A constant theme of the films is that Smiley is a victim of bad parenting – or rather, bad fathering, as his mother is always shown as loving, if exasperated. His father is not even that, although he is at least at home in the second film. He has become a blacksmith, instead of a drover, and we don’t see him drinking this time. In fact, the vices of the first film, Smiley (1956), are gone now – there are no scenes inside the town’s hotel, no sub-plot involving drugs.
Rafferty gives a hammy performance as the policeman, although he retains a certain warmth towards Smiley. That’s welcome, given that many of the other adults around him are disappointing or just plain nasty. Smiley’s father was an absent drunk in the first film; he’s much more present in the second, but no more paternal. He bets against his own son being ‘responsible’ enough to win the gun, and is disappointed when he looks like being successful. He even sabotages the boy’s efforts directly, by persuading him to perform a risqué limerick at a public concert.
The film offers Smiley fewer positive moral lessons than the first. It lacks the towering moral figure that Ralph Richardson provided in the first film, and that’s a serious flaw in the script. It pushes the film more towards broad comedy and away from relevance. Keith Calvert does a great job in the title role, playing a more cherubic and vulnerable version of Smiley than did Colin Petersen, but he’s in a weaker vehicle, where the script relies on stolen gold and the witch-like Granny McKinley. Director Anthony Kimmins does less with less, in that sense.
