peteg's blog - noise - movies - 2022 06 24 Kangaroo TheAustralianStory

Kangaroo: The Australian Story (1952)

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On a DVD extracted from the Orange City library, watched over a couple of nights beside Ilparpa Road at Alice Springs. Beyond redemption in all regards: this release was almost unwatchably low-fi, while the feature itself goes through all the motions familiar from Westerns and later Ozploitation movies. Maureen O’Hara leads as the unfathomably single daughter of South Australia-station-owning Irishman Finlay Currie. (Despite the familiarity of her name, I can't recall seeing her before.) Plotwise it's tiresome. The bulk of the second half is a cattle muster/drove that is pretty much the same as all cattle musters/droves, including the one in Australia. IMDB tells me it was the first Technicolor Hollywood production in Australia. The accents are all over the map. Director Lewis Milestone did much better on many other projects.

Bosley Crowther was bored apart from "some interesting scenes of the fauna and flora" and the scenes featuring Aborigines — shades of Walkabout. Ozmovies: it's always been a dog.