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Clip description
HMAS Sydney rushes to engage the Emden off the Cocos Islands, after picking up the alarm signal sent from the wireless station at Deception Island. The Sydney crew man their stations, but one crewman decides it’s time to collect all monies owed, before his pals ‘get blowed up’.
Curator’s notes
Some splendid shots of HMAS Sydney at full tilt, shot during exercises at Jervis Bay, on the NSW south coast in 1928. Ken G Hall joined the ship with two newsreel cameramen for a week, in order to shoot new material to refashion the original German film, Unsere Emden (1926, see main notes).
These comedy scenes, featuring real sailors selected by Ken Hall, are among the first scenes directed by Hall, and they give us a taste of things to come in his work. Hall’s taste for broad comedy is apparent even in this film – which is hardly natural material for comedy. The title card midway through this clip explaining that this incident is based on ‘absolute fact’ is an unusual touch – Hall is anticipating the audience’s scepticism, so he nips it in the bud by direct address to them.
These scenes aboard HMAS Sydney were added to the film to replace German-shot scenes in which German actors played Australian sailors. Hall wrote that the original film was ‘not all that badly put together – but when it came to the sequences involving Sydney – well, they were a pretty poor joke. Square-headed German sailors in funny-looking caps racing round as Australian tars would have had audiences either in stiches or wild with rage…’
One of the sequences that Hall filmed was a simulated burial-at-sea, to mark the men killed, but that sequence has been lost.
