Share
Clip description
Jack (Snowy Baker) has pursued the German spies to the secret beach from which they will rendezvous with a German ship. Master villain Brasels (John Faulkner) has kidnapped Jack’s girl Myee (Lily Molloy) and tied her to a rock, where she will be drowned by the tide. Jack must climb down a tall cliff to rescue her, while Warne (Billy Ryan) takes pot shots at him from the water. One of these cuts the rope, forcing Jack to make a dangerous dive. As the waters lap around Myee, a government patrol boat picks up the German spies.
Note: The original aspect ratio is 1.33:1 (Academy full frame). The print of The Enemy Within obtained by the NFSA had been incorrectly duplicated at an 1.37:1 (Academy) ratio, which has cut approximately 3 mm off the top and left-hand side off the frame.
Curator’s notes
If you look very hard at the cliff shots, you will see a tiny figure in the top right-hand corner, climbing down a rope. The audiences at the time could only see this in a cinema, so the figure would have been more visible. Nevertheless, it shows that the filmmakers either did not have access to, or could not afford, a longer lens with which to make this scene clearer.
We know very little about who financed this film, although Greg Growden, one of Snowy Baker’s biographers, quotes one of Baker’s brothers as saying it was made ‘for the government’ (see main curator notes). The anti-Wobblies politics and anti-German feeling certainly chime with Billy Hughes’s then campaign to bring in conscription, but almost half of the country agreed with that proposition. It’s possible that Baker financed the film himself, with contributions from his usual backers – HD McIntosh and John Wren. McIntosh was an extremely active propagandist for the war and conscription, and a major force in show business as the owner of the Tivoli circuit of vaudeville theatres.
