peteg's blog - noise - movies - 2022 05 22 TravellingNorth

Travelling North (1987)

/noise/movies | Link

On a DVD extracted from the Orange City library, watched out the back of the Nullarbor Roadhouse near the Murrawijinie Caves. I saw a production of the David Williamson play back in 2007 but didn't remember anything of it. This was weak. Rumpole Leo McKern retires from a life of communism and civil engineering in Melbourne to fishing in Port Douglas with Julia Blake, who is no more than a sex object for the (non-)superannuated men to slobber over. He is invariantly irascible; how they met and how their relationship functioned before the move is a mystery. Aggressively hospitable neighbour Graham Kennedy is a bit too wooden. GP Henri Szeps fidgets while he waits for his cue then ejaculates his lines. Overall it just mines the old warnings of moving away from friends and family, which really is no problem for Rumpole as he only has a tenuous connection with a daughter. The rampant egoism is tedious.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars at the time. Some colour from Paul Byrnes. Vincent Canby: dreary. Excess details at Ozmovies.