Australian
Screen

Clip description

Gilbert Galloway (Rawdon Blandford) has become a tramp after disgracing himself in the city. He gets caught in a bushfire near Wallaby Station. Tom Wattleby (Dunstan Webb) rides out to rescue him, unaware of this tramp’s identity. Back safely at Wallaby Station, his mother and sister recognise Gilbert, just as the rains begin to fall. The drought is finally over.

Curator’s notes

The finale of the film is a victory of action and excitement over logic. The drought has not yet broken when Tom takes his ‘desperate chance’, by jumping off rocks into a fairly well-filled river, horse and all. Barrett does a lot here with smoke, rather than fire. Ken G Hall would mount a very similar scene 14 years later in his version of The Squatter’s Daughter (1933). Quite how Barrett got the horse to leap into the river remains unclear, but one can guess that someone had to stand behind and push. The use of split-screen titles, with gushing water, was quite innovative, although Barrett had used this technique before.

We can see in this scene that neither he, nor his actors, made much distinction between theatre and film performance. Most of them were stage professionals. Barrett was said to have been a very ‘kind’ director, who gave his actors few instructions. Note the way that Dunstan Webb clutches at his breast to signify his tiredness once he dumps Gilbert in the chair. By contrast, look at the way Raymond Longford’s actors perform in The Sentimental Bloke (1919), made around the same time. The style of acting is much more naturalistic in Longford’s work.