At CINEMA REBORN - Margot Nash's introduction to the Sydney screening of the Australian Social Realism program.

 Cinema Reborn: Australian Social Realism: Three Shorts (1977- 1983) 

My name is Margot Nash. A big thank you to Cinema Reborn for asking me to introduce this program. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the unceded land we meet on today, the Gadigal and Bidjigal people of the Eora nation, and pay my respects to elders past and present. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. 

Mary Callaghan

When Wall Street crashed in 1929, the world plunged into what is now known as the Great Depression.  In Australia, working people suffered mass unemployment and poverty, but the reality of their stories was rarely recorded on screen. The Hollywood behemoth was taking over film exhibition and distribution in this country, shutting Australian filmmakers out, (but that’s another story) and Australian cinemas were dominated by escapist feel good movies, meant to cheer people up. It was before television and newsreels played in the cinemas on a constant loop, with news from Australia and around the world as well as ‘human interest’ stories, which did not include the tough stories of working-class life. 

 

Social Realism emerged as an international art movement, during this time depicting the lives of the poor and marginalized. United by a belief in the power of art to reflect reality, and raise awareness of social issues, it was an anti-war and anti-fascist movement that included film, theatre, photography, painting and literature.  In Australia, Sydney’s New Theatre emerged in 1932 from the Sydney Workers Art Club under the slogan ’Art As a Weapon’. 

 

Ray Argall

Later, the Melbourne Realist Film Group in the 40s and the Sydney Waterside Workers Federation Film Unit in the 50s documented working-class lives and their struggles for social justice. John Hughes’ 2006 documentary The Archive Project tells the story of the Realist Film Group, and some of you will have seen some of the Waterside Workers Film Unit films, which I introduced at Cinema Reborn in 2022. Both groups were closely connected with the New Theatre.

 

The most famous Waterside Workers film was The Hungry Miles. Made in 1955 it was about the struggle on the waterfront against the unfair work practices of the shipowners during the Great Depression. Without newsreel archival footage to draw on, the unit staged re-enactments. Today, it is this vivid footage that is often used as archival film of the Depression. Even though it was filmed in the 1950s using wharfie non-actors, many of whom had lived through the Depression.

 

The Australian film renaissance in the 1970s opened up possibilities for local filmmakers to explore Australian stories. Many focussed on colonial foundation stories, or what has been described as the ‘bonnet’ dramas. However, social realism remained a developing historical thread with feature dramas like Ken Hannam’s Sunday too Far Away, about the 1956 shearers strike, and John Duigan’s Mouth to Mouth about homeless working-class kids.

 

In the early 1980s, the Art and Working Life movement in both Sydney and Melbourne carried on the social realist tradition, across genres, in an attempt to bridge the gap between professional artists and the labour movement.

 

David Hay

The three films you will see today – Ray Argall’s 1983 Julie, Julie..., Dave Hay and Martha Ansara’s 1977 Me and Daphne and Mary Callaghan’s 1982 Greetings from Wollongong carry on this tradition. Theywere all filmed in existing workplaces and homes using mainly non-actors, thus also drawing on the legacy of Neorealism, which emerged during World War 2 with Rossellini’s Rome Open City, filmed in 1945 on the streets and in the houses of war-torn Rome, using actors like Anna Magnani alongside non-actors.

 

Me and Daphne

All three films explore the reality of working-class women’s work in the late 70s and early 80s. The dead-end, low-paid, repetitive factory jobs, often in isolated rural areas, the desire for social justice and the need to speak out, but also the desire for ‘something more’. For pleasure, for experience, or even just time to rest and reflect.

 

The women you will meet in these stories all want ‘something more’ and their gritty social realist narratives can also be contextualised within the 1970s women’s liberation movement, which told women they not only had the right to speak up and fight for their rights, but they could do anything they wanted to, if they put their mind to it.

 

Martha Ansara, who produced and filmed Me and Daphne, fought tooth and nail to get into the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) to learn the camera, eventually pretending she wanted to be a director, so she could get access to the camera department, which, at that time, was solely a male domain.

 

Greetings from Wollongong

Before directing Greetings from Wollongong, the late Mary Callaghan had directed a short student film called Image Plus about the unreal and unattainable images of women in the media. Callaghan brought this analysis, along with her flair as a visual artist, to Greetings from Wollongong which follows a group of young unemployed kids who all need to find work to survive, but who also desire pleasure, and fun, in a bleak industrial town that has little to offer them. 

 

When we meet the main character in Ray Argall’s short film Julie, Julie..., she is cruising on her beloved motorbike, alone and free, on the highway heading for Melbourne from Broken Hill, looking for ‘something more’, when her plans are interrupted and her life changes. Again, the actors are predominantly non-actors and the locations reflect the reality of Julie’s choices. 

 

Of the three films, Greetings from Wollongong was the only one to receive funding from the then Australian Film Commission’s Creative Development Branch and Women’s Film Fund. It also had support from local businesses, unions and regional organisations and Mary produced a set of screen-printed postcards to raise money for the film.

 

Julie, Julie...

Julie, Julie... was made by the filmmakers on spec as a cinema short. The cinema chains, at the time, were talking about screening shorts before features, so they filmed it on Super 16mm in order to blow it up 35mm to this end. Unfortunately, this never happened, but they kept going. Ray, who had been making music videos and working for the ABC, had his own equipment and, working with a small independent crew. He and his co-workers financed it themselves and paid award wages. 

 

Me and Daphne has a more complex provenance which I don’t have time to do full justice to today, but I will try.  It was made at AFTRS ostensibly as a training film for students. The legendary John Flaus, was running the Open program at the time, and wanted a film to teach students about ‘visual thinking’. Why choose a close up as opposed to a wide shot?  Why use voice over instead of sync sound etc. Shot in a chicken factory in NSW, the film was directed by Dave Hay and shot by Martha Ansara.  

 

Dave had been to film school at UCLA and, inspired by social realist films he had studied there, decided to film in a local factory and use actors next to non-actors.  Martha brought a short story called Confessions of a Cannery Worker by Lillian Rosser. It was about a mother and daughter, forced work in a pineapple cannery in Brisbane to pay their electricity bill. They decided to use this story ‘as the basis for the plot to be illustrated in the proposed training film’. Then they set out to make two films. One for training film school students and the other to show the conditions migrant women workers had to endure, and their struggle for better conditions. 

 

The images of migrant women on the production line in the chicken factory in Me and Daphne are unforgettable and the film itself became something of a cause célèbre because, after it was screened to the Head of the Film School, Jerzy Toeplitz and the Director of the Training School, Storry Walton, Toeplitz pulled it out of circulation and ordered it to be recut. 

 

Fearing it would be destroyed, our fearless young filmmakers decided they would ‘retrieve’ the original negatives from the laboratory and put the film back together. So, Dave forged Toeplitz’s signature, picked up the original negative from the lab (in broad daylight), had it secretly edited and neg matched in Melbourne, and sent out of the country for prints to be made.

 

While Dave was dodging Commonwealth Police surveillance, Martha mounted a campaign to raise funds to finish the film but, just as it was set to screen at the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op in Darlinghurst, the Co-op received a court injunction from AFTRS barring the screening. Not to be deterred the filmmakers famously screened it outside the Co-op, on a wall in St Peters Lane, where, luckily, Martha met a fancy high-profile lawyer. 

 

AFTRS took them to the Supreme Court and all the film materials were seized. Dave and Martha’s decided to argue that, as the creative originators of the film, they should hold joint copyright with the school, and therefore have an equal say in the film’s exhibition and distribution. Unfortunately, Dave got sick and Martha had to front up alone, but after much ado, while the case was lost (after the judge found out about the St Peters Lane screening), the filmmakers did eventually get all the footage back.

 

This screening is the first public screening of Me and Daphne since that time, although the film was distributed covertly for years by the late Julie Wiggins.

Martha is very much alive and here if you want to ask her questions later, Martha please stand up. Warrior woman. Not to be messed with.

(Clap clap).

 

Ray Argall is also here. Another warrior, whose tireless work to restore and value the work of Australian independent filmmakers is also legendary. He restored all three films in this program, along with Greg Fitzgerald who did the restoration work on the sound.

 

Please stand up Ray and Greg.     (Clap clap)  

I hope you enjoy the films. You can see the Chips Mackinolty screen-printed poster (above) for the Filmmakers Co - op screening of Me and Daphne, alongside Mary Callaghan’s fluorescent screen-printed postcards for Greetings for Wollongong in the glass case just outside the door when you leave the cinema.

 

Thank you very much

 

Margot Nash 10 May 2026

The Current French Cinema - Tom Ryan reviews THE RICHEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD (Thierry Klifa, 2025) & THE STRANGER (François Ozon, 2025)

La femme la plus riche du monde /The Richest Woman in the World (2025, Thierry Klifa, 121 minutes)

Thierry Klifa

Former film journalist Thierry Klifa’s film is, an opening caption announces, “loosely inspired” by the 2010 Bettencourt affair. So, first, some background. Billionaire Liliane Bettencourt (who died in 2017) was the wife of a high-ranking French cabinet minister. He’d formerly been a member of a pro-Nazi group supported by her father, from whom she inherited the L'Oréal empire in 1957. Thirty years on, she met a photographer (for the magazine, Egoïste), befriended him and became his benefactor, their relationship eventually opening the door to a scandal that embroiled not only members of her family but also the Sarkozy government. (1)

The details of that case are more or less consistent with what happens in the film, although the characters’ names have been changed not so much to protect the innocent, presumably, as to ensure that the filmmakers don’t end up in court. Klifa puts it slightly differently: “Rather than illustrate the story we already know,” he recently told The New York Times. “I thought I would show something we didn’t know, represent a milieu that has almost never been represented in France: the milieu of the grande bourgeoisie, of the ultrarich, of very chic families who slip under the radar and who are never spoken about – especially in the 1980s and 1990s, when there was no social media and everything wasn’t all over the press.”

In the film, co-written by Klifa, first with Cédric Anger and then Jacques Fieschi, Bettencourt becomes Marianne Farrère (played by Isabelle Huppert), the head of Windler Paris, a woman lost in an airless world where everything is in its proper place and money is the everyday currency of intimate exchange. 

Guy, her cabinet-minister husband (André Marcon), is solid and supportive but staid, his values in sharp contrast those of flamboyant photographer Pierre-Alain Fantin (Laurent Lafitte), who works for a magazine that’s now (hilariously) Selfish and who likes to light up every room he enters. Although he can be entertaining – Marianne is immediately drawn to him – he is most certainly not to be trusted. 

Lafitte exuberantly embraces the part, as he has similar roles in recent times (The Party’s Over! / Classe Moyenne, Class Reunion / T’as pas change and the TV series, Class Act / Tapie). “There’s nothing more sinister than good taste,” his Fantin reflects, loudly, as he’s introduced to the conservative claustrophobia of Marianne’s existence, going on to draw her out of the prison of her wealth that she’d thought was her fortress against the world.

 

Isabelle Huppert 

Alongside them, their presences gradually increasing in significance, are Marianne’s stepdaughter, Frédérique (Marina Foïs), her husband, Jean-Marc (Mathieu Demy, son of Jacques and Agnes Varda), and Marianne’s butler, Jérôme (Raphaël Personnaz). Initially, Fantin charms Frédérique by telling her she’d look very pretty without her glasses – she removes them immediately and we never see her wearing them again – but she’s soon suspicious of his motives and bewildered by his bravado. “Have you always been like this?” she asks. “We’re happier when we dare,” he replies past a provocatively raised eyebrow.  

He immediately sums up Jean-Marc as a man who’s doomed to mediocrity because he doesn’t. On the other hand, his radar remains on full alert, and with good reason, as soon as he encounters Jérôme, who, like him, is gay. And, embodying the spirit of the proverbial cat among the pigeons, he knows everyone’s secrets (except for Jérôme’s) and how to exploit them. 

Klifa’s film doesn’t sidestep the dark aspects of his story – specifically its connections to what took place in France during the years of the German Occupation – and the film maintains its distance from all the characters. But he still manages to make us care: “I never tried to make these characters likeable, or to force any emotional attachment,” he says. “What mattered was staying as close as possible to their inner truth.  They are both monstrous and deeply childlike. If emotion does emerge, it’s through their vulnerabilities, their solitude.”  

     (1) The affair is the subject of the three-part 2023 documentary, The Billionaire, the Boyfriend and the Butler, currently available on Netflix.

L'Étranger/The Stranger (2025, François Ozon, 122 minutes)

François Ozon

The Stranger is François Ozon’s 25th feature, co-written with regular collaborator Philippe Piazzo and based on Albert Camus’ famous novel, first published in 1942. Both book and film are set in Algiers in 1938, a time of turmoil marked by increasing hostility to French oppression. With a population of around seven million, six million of whom were Muslim, it had been a colony for more than a century with independence still more than two decades away. (1)

Shot in black and white with Morocco playing Algiers, Ozon’s film – like Luchino Visconti’s 1967 adaptation (2) – remains relatively faithful to Camus’ original with its simple plot, its enigmatic protagonist and narrator, Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), and its sketch of a society trying to make sense of a man who’s simply not interested in its rules. Its chief difference lies in how it draws to the surface the social and political circumstances in which Meursault finds himself. “I felt I was pulling on a thread that Camus had woven without developing,” Ozon says.

The film opens with a French cinema newsreel from the 1930s, effectively an advertisement designed to attract Europeans to view Algeria as a desirable place to visit, totally erasing its troubled history. A precursor perhaps to the current American president’s visualisation of Gaza as a tourist destination! 

Benjamin Voisin

In the next sequence, Meursault is introduced, a shadowy figure finding himself sharing a large detention cell with a group of Arab men. Asked why he’s there, he announces, “I killed an Arab,” before the film plunges into the past that has led to his incarceration and that has determined his fate.

Like Camus’ Meursault, Ozon’s remains a mystery, a metaphorical blank page who tempts us to try to inscribe motives on him for his mindset only to thwart us at every turn. The lack of emotion in Voisin’s performance is compelling; he could easily be an actor in a Bresson film. As Ozon’s studied compositions watch Meursault either in close-up or wide-shots shared by others, Voisin’s responses give nothing away. And Meursault is watching too, an impassive observer as the world passes him by, perhaps wondering about what he’s seeing, perhaps not. Several times during the course of the film, he says he’s bored by it all. (3)

For the actor, the demands of the role made for an unexpected challenge. “Playing absence is extremely draining,” Voisin says. “Doing almost nothing, saying almost nothing, is intensely physical! At the end of each day of shooting, I was utterly exhausted.

One effect of this air of detachment attached to Meursault is to shift our attention on to what’s happening around him. When news arrives of his mother’s death, Meursault travels to the countryside to visit the aged-care home where her body awaits burial. As he indifferently goes through the motions of what’s required, what emerges in scene after scene are the rituals ruling what’s going on: the expectation that he’ll want to see her body for the last time (“What’s the point?” he asks), the vigil as he sits overnight with her coffin, the other residents at the home filing in to say their farewells, the horse and carriage that serve as a hearse, the procession to the church, the mass, his black armband… 

He’s a person with desires – and they’re manifested in his relationship with Marie (Rebecca Marder, who has the demeanour of a young Juliette Binoche) – but his disengagement is palpable, and that makes the world around him a key issue for the film. The signs in the cinema foyer forbidding entry to “indigenes”; his neighbour (Pierre Lottin) brutalising his Arab mistress; Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit), whose brother Moussa (Abderrahmane Dehkani) is the man Meursault subsequently kills; the traces of racism that infect interactions in the street; the courtroom rituals; the propositions put forward there about his crime. Was it premeditated? Was it in self-defence? Was it chance?

The film invites us to decode all of this, and to see it in a wider context, social and historical. In a scene that doesn’t happen in the novel (the only one from which Meursault is excluded as a witness), Marie and Djemila come face-to-face during a break in the trial, Djemila’s protests about how her brother has been forgotten by the trial leading to Marie’s attempt to defend Meursault’s place in the scheme of things (“His home is here”), which produces a scoff from Djemila that says everything that needs to be said. Neither Djemila nor Moussa have names in Camus’ novel.

Featuring an edgy score by West African Arab composer Fatima Al-Qadiri (and including The Cure’s 1980 song “Killing of an Arab” over the closing credits), Ozon’s film is gripping, politically astute and, finally, like its source, deeply unsettling.

 (1) Algeria was where Camus was born (in 1913) and where he lived until 1942, when he moved to Paris, eventually joing the Resistance

(2)   Ozon on Visconti’s adaptation: “I obviously watched Visconti’s 1967 film. In one of his interviews, he confessed that he hadn’t been able to make the film he wanted, that he had been frustrated, that he wasn’t happy with it, and that his initial choice for Meursault was not Mastroianni, but Delon, which was honestly a much better idea. The perfect incarnation of Meursault in the 1960s was indeed the young Delon, who featured in Le Samouraï, or, even better, the Delon from Antonioni’s L’eclisse, who, in my opinion, would have been the ideal Italian director to adapt The Stranger.”

      (3) Ozon on Meursault: “I identified with him completely! To me, he’s a filmmaker! He looks around him; he sees characters, actors. The others are acting their lives. But not him, he refuses to play along. He never lies. Life is a stage play from which he is absent. However, he sees the beauty of the world, and its violence too. And when he observes this violence, he doesn’t intervene. He remains a spectator. Until the very end, when he finally rebels and becomes the actor of his own life!”

At CINEMA REBORN - CJ Johnson's introduction to the Sydney screening of ONE HOUR WITH YOU (Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 1932

Editor's Note: CJ Johnson has introduced a number of films at our Cinema Reborn seasons. CJ has been a resident critic on ABC radio since 2008 and lectures on cinema at the Art Gallery of NSW. In October he will be leading a tour presented by the AGNSW to the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon and participants will have the opportunity to discover the birthplace of cinema and attend one of the cinematic world’s most prestigious annual events. Experience highlights of the week-long Lumière Film Festival, one of the largest international festivals of classic cinema, in Lyon, home of the Cinematograph and where cinema was born. Wander through the Musée Lumière and learn about the Lumière brothers, the fathers of cinema and inventors of the revolutionary camera and projector. Enjoy day trips to the surrounding countryside, with its rolling vineyards and charming medieval villages.

• Attend the internationally renowned Lumière Film Festival in Lyon, the cradle of cinematic history.

• Visit the Musée Lumière and discover the various inventions of the Lumiere brothers, the fathers of cinema.

• Uncover the secrets of filmmaking at the Musée Cinéma et Miniature.

 Click here for more information  

Renaissance Tours 
Tel 1300 727 095 
info@renaissancetours.com.au

ONE HOUR WITH YOU has encore screenings at the Ritz Cinemas Randwick and the Lido Cinemas Hawthorn on Wednesday 13 May at 11.00 am. Tickets available at the door of both cinemas. Just click on the cinemas names to go through if you wish to book in advance.

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Two years ago I had the great pleasure of introducing Mitchell Leisen’s delightful screwball comedy Midnight, from 1939, for Cinema Reborn, and when I did I questioned, and attempted to answer, why Leisen was not remembered, watched and celebrated in the same way that Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch continue to be. Self-evidently, I don’t need to answer that question about Lubitsch. Lubitsch is the sex comedy OG. 

For those of you who weren’t into early 90s Gangsta Rap, ‘OG’ means “Original Gangster”, which you might translate as ‘first great pioneer.’ The OG doesn’t need to have invented the artistic form in question, but rather to have been the earliest pioneer of most defining impact. There is no doubt that, for sex comedy, and romantic and screwball comedy, worldwide, that was Lubitsch. Here’s the thing: with many art forms, once the OG has set the basic template, the artists in their wake tend first to imitate, then build upon, the OG style. Gangsta rap changed radically over the years, from an upbeat party sound to a grittier, more autobiographical, and ultimately brutally violent record of Black American urban life. It grew more radical. 

But the OG of sex and romantic and screwball comedy, Ernst Lubitsch, brought the radical from the get-go. Instead of future practitioners pushing the boundaries of the form, Lubitsch’s followers evolved towards the mainstream, to the point that, ultimately, screwball died off, and sex comedy absolutely died off, leaving the much more middle-of-the-road form of Romantic Comedy as the enduring legacy. Lubitsch’s work was both the pioneering and the radical forms of itself, and very few have managed to match it for its subversive, ground-breaking, rule-breaking joie de vivre. 

Lubitsch really went to town in 1932 and 1933, for he gave us today’s film in 1932, followed in 1933 by Design for Living, the greatest movie ever made about thrupples. Thrupples, for those who may not be aware, are romantic partnerships of three people. Design for Living is about a thrupple. It ends with Miriam Hopkins in the back of a limousine with her two loves, Frederick March and Gary Cooper. They’re heading off into their fabulous new life together. First, she deeply kisses March, then she turns her head and deeply kisses Cooper. Then they all smile and giggle before the screen fades to black. They’re off to have a good time. 

We can have a good time thinking about their good time, even though most of us would find it tricky to emulate in real life. Jack Thompson did, and not only that, he did it with two sisters, for fifteen years. Lubitsch would have loved that. He could have made a very funny film based on that. In Lubitschland, thrupples are funny! 

While Design for Living pushed sexual and societal norms, One Hour With You also pushed filmmaking ones. From the very first scene, which isn’t a song but is spoken in rhyme, this film stands out as radical. When a Parisian police chief instructs his officers in rhyme, something is up. There aren’t that many rules yet and Lubitsch is simultaneously creating and breaking them. The very next scene, he takes another rule - don’t look at the camera - and smashes it. He allows Maurice Chevalier to turn to camera and speak directly to us, the audience. In Chevalier’s hands it feels natural; indeed, he’d done it a few times before with Lubitsch, and it wouldn’t be the last time: famously, 26 years later, Chevalier opens Gigi the same way, extolling the virtues of grooming little girls so that when they come of age you can be ready to pounce. 

Chevalier has always been cast as the classy sleaze, and that’s his role here. His opening monologue to camera, broken down, is basically saying, “Can you believe how young and hot my wife is? My god, I have to tell you, I love sleeping with her and I do it as much as I can.” His wife is played by Jeanette McDonald, who was 29 to Chevalier’s 44, so you can appreciate his enthusiasm. It’s not the world’s biggest age difference, and  certainly not by Hollywood standards, but it’s enough for the policeman in the park scene to assume, and assume very confidently, that these two could not be husband and wife. 

So about that park scene, the second in the film, right after the police chief instructs his officers in rhyme: let’s decode it, let’s all get on the same page, which is to say, on Lubitsch’s page. The police chief, at the beginning of the film, after reminding his cops that the tourists who flock to Paris are coming for one thing and one thing only - sex - instructs them to basically let all the tourists get away with whatever they want, except for making love in the parks after dark. It seems the fabled Parisian cafés are losing customers once night falls, because they’re all going off to root in the bushes, and it’s up to the constabulary to root them out of the bushes and back into the cafés. So in the next scene, the cops do exactly that. 

The production code, that hideous studio agreement designed to appease the Catholic League of Decency and keep federal government censorship at bay, was created in 1930 but barely enforced until 1934. This self-muzzling set of restrictions is the reason that the rest of the world, watching American movies made between 1934 and about 1960, thought that American married couples slept in separate beds or even bedrooms, that there was no interracial romance, that there were no homosexuals except self-loathing or homicidal ones, that people didn’t bleed when they got shot, that nobody swore or blasphemed, that adults wore pyjamas, that all adultery ended in punishment, and that nobody went to the toilet. (It’s true - Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960 was the first American mainstream release to show a toilet bowl.) 

Films released in 1932, like One Hour With You, are considered ‘pre-code’, which allowed them a great degree of naughtiness but not, perhaps, some of the explicit imagery of the silent era. One Hour With You is pure pre-code; just as Design for Living is a celebration of the joy of threesomes, so too One Hour With You is a hearty endorsement of adultery. In this film, it doesn’t wreck your marriage, it makes it more fun. But that doesn’t mean that Lubitsch was able or willing to show a parkfull of grunting fornicators, so he encoded it. When the cops raid the park, what you’ll see on screen is a lot of couples making out on park benches. But what Lubitsch wants you to see in your mind’s eye is those same couples gleefully humping al fresco. So have that locked and loaded, and make it as filthy as you like. That’s what Lubitsch would want you to do. 

This is a film that is completely, unashamedly, joyously about one thing: sex. It’s about sex in the park and sex with your wife and sex with your wife’s best friend. Credits. Indeed, the key to having the most fun with Lubitsch is simply to remember this: every time you think you’re hearing a dirty double-entendre, you are hearing a dirty double-entendre, and in any given moment, vocal inflection, cutaway shot or simple gesture you can decipher a possible sexual metaphor: bang! You’re right on the money. Every possible lewd interpretation is the right interpretation. That’s part of the Lubitsch touch! 

Marurice Chevalier was all about sex. His persona was very clearly established in the public’s perception as ‘randy Frenchman’. In one of his previous collaborations with Lubitsch and leading lady Jeanette McDonald, The Love Parade - 1929 - his character is a diplomat who has to be reprimanded by The Queen because he’s been bonking everyone at the Embassy including the Ambassador’s wife. Then, right before One Hour With You, Lubitsch directed him in The Smiling Lieutenant, which may as well have been called The Horny Lieutenant. That film, full of Chevalier winking and raising his eyebrows before walking into ladies' bedrooms, was Paramount’s biggest hit in 1931, and Chevalier’s reputation as a lascivious continental was truly cemented. 

All of which is important to know to fully appreciate what’s going on in One Hour With You. Chevalier’s speech directly to the audience at the beginning of the film is a big in-joke. The subtext, which would have been clear to all audiences in 1932, was that Chevalier was a man who was always on the make, regardless of anyone’s marital status, so his declaration that he was married, deeply in love with his wife and enjoying plenty of monogamous sex with her, was risible, an ironic metatextual gag. “Chevalier? Married and monogamous? Pah! Pull the other one!” That’s the set-up. We know that’s not his true character and in a way, we’re now put into the position of waiting for him to be tested. It doesn’t take long. But in the early stages of the film, as he valiantly tries to resist the allures of the extremely eager Mitzi, the fact that this is Chevalier, the man who cannot resist the primal urge, raises the comedic stakes. It would be like opening a film with W.C. Fields claiming that he had gone sober and then locking him into an unattended liquor store overnight. 

Chevalier’s trademark was a straw boater hat and bow tie, and the fact that he wears these accoutrements in the film, as he did in most of his films, makes it even clearer that we’re meant to bring our Chevalier baggage with us into the movie. Like W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers and others, although Chevalier plays different characters in his different films, he is also always playing ‘Maurice Chevalier’, and ‘Maurice Chevalier’ is a lecherous horndog. That was his reputation in real life, too: Jeanette McDonald called him ‘the quickest derrière pincher in Hollywood’.  

Supposedly, and certainly to do with that derrière-pinching, Chevalier and McDonald did not get along too well, but you’d never know it from their four films together. They had fabulous on-screen chemistry, and that is integral to One Hour With You. We can believe that these two are enjoying a good marriage and are attracted to each other romantically and sexually, and that makes the dramatic and comic tension of Chevalier’s almost inevitable philandering all the stronger. That, and the fact that we don’t want to see McDonald get hurt. Her Colette is the most sympathetic, likeable character in One Hour With You, and McDonald gives perhaps her best performance among her four collaborations with Lubitsch. 

Lubitsch himself did not have a reputation as a groper, lech or adulterer; he was married twice but there is no existing evidence of the kind of sexual adventurism he celebrated in his films. There’s a great quote from critic Michael Wilmington: Lubitsch’s films “were directed by a man who was amused by sex rather than frightened of it – and who taught a whole culture to be amused by it as well.” And that is a huge part of what came to be known as ‘The Lubitsch Touch’. It was a light-hearted, joyful and hugely permissive approach to sex that allowed us to laugh along with things like adultery rather than be shocked or offended by it. In Lubitschland, sexual desire is omnipresent and unregulated: the Parisian cops encourage it, just not in the park. There are no priests tut-tutting, and certainly no children weeping as their parents engage in bitter custody disputes. Sex is free and easy and, most importantly, fun. It’s something to be looked forward to. 

In One Hour With You, the eager Mitzi, played very coquettishly by Genevieve Tobin, schemes to be visited by Chevalier’s Andre, and when her maid confirms he’s on his way over, she moans, falls back on her divan, kicks off her shoes and wiggles her feet in lustful anticipation. She can’t wait to knock Chevalier off this silly, sanctimonious ‘monogamy’ kick he’s on, and neither, quite frankly, can we. You can’t have a sex comedy without sex, and married sex, especially in Lubitschland, is just not very funny. Thrupples are funny. Adultery is funny. And if you can get on board with that, there’s nothing in One Hour With You to shock or offend or disgust or appall you. Lubitsch isn’t trying to provoke you. He just wants you to have a good time. 

Enjoy.

On Australian Film History - Rod Bishop reviews THE LAST DAYS OF ZANE GREY by Vicki Hastrich, Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2025

In the 1930s, Americans didn’t believe sharks ate people.

Hollywood celebrity novelist Zane Grey knew they did, and came to Australia to big game fish in 1935 and 1939. The great white shark rarely attacks humans, but it was Grey’s holy grail and he fished at Bermagui, Batemans Bay, Hayman Island, Lady Musgrave Island, Sydney Heads and Port Lincoln. 

He also acted as himself in White Death (1936), a feature film about catching a great white off Hayman Island.

Zane Grey wrote over 100 novels and short stories. His literary output contributed to 112 films and 3 television series. Starting with the publication of his first book Riders of the Purple Sage in 1912, he became regarded as a major force in establishing the underlying mythologies of the Western genre.

Grey had a clause in his Hollywood contracts insisting the films he wrote should be shot on locations where his novels were set. This opened up the startling landscapes of America’s south-west (such as Monument Valley) to many Americans who were seeing them for the first time.  

At his peak in the 1930s, Grey’s novels and his Hollywood assignments earned him $350,000 a year. In today’s terms, that’s millions a year. 

Enough for him to arrive on our shores with a retinue of helpers, including a business manager, three cameramen, several boats, tents, copious fishing gear (valued today at $AU1,350,000) and 166 suitcases, requiring a two-ton truck. His elaborate camps were set up with kitchens, sleeping tents, temporary wooden floors and even offices where he could continue writing and managing his business.

His arrival in Australia was very big news. Some have even suggested the mass hysteria over Grey’s swashbuckling fishing expeditions in Australia are only matched in this country by the arrival of The Beatles.

Author of The Last Days of Zane Grey, Vicki Hastrich writes: “We just went crazy for him. As far as I can tell there were something like nine of Grey’s films in circulation when he arrived in Australia in 1935.”

The media fiercely chased him for fishing tales, Western stories, photos, interviews and public appearances. Writing home to his wife Dolly in the USA, Grey said between 250 and 500 visitors came to his Bermagui camp each day hoping to see him. 

Hastrich writes: “The constant incursions on his privacy at the Bermagui camp were becoming intolerable. The stream of stickybeakers wandering through had never stopped, all of them wanting something…One woman walked through the camp on the morning after the Zane Grey birthday party: there were no people, she said, but she did see the remains of his birthday cake left out on a table. This qualified as news, as did many other petty invasions.”

Grey said of Australia: “This is the greatest country I have ever visited…the finest fishing in the world…You are developing an individual race, somewhat like the south-west Americans. The New Zealanders are more English than the English.”

Despite the patronizing attitude to First Nations people in the cast of White Death, Hastrich says: “Grey had seen Aboriginal people as intelligent, skillful and knowledgeable – qualities rarely ascribed to them by white Australia.”

This very readable account of Grey in Australia is exhaustively researched. It details all of his fishing expeditions, his prodigious spending, his precarious financial state, his numerous extramarital affairs (some scandalous), his plans for Australian novels and his literary legacy. But love affairs and letters back to Dolly apart, we don’t get too many insights into the man. One, however, is his reaction to reading John O’Hara’s ‘dirty’ BUtterfield 8. He burnt his copy in the camp fire, then argued with defenders of the book on his staff, who promptly quit and returned to the States in disgust.

Made on a budget of $AU2,700,000 and shot on Hayman Island in Queensland, White Death can be found on three YouTube  files, although sound drops out for 10 minutes. Grey, on screen for the first time in a feature film, plays himself, and it makes a lucid definition of near unwatchable, wooden acting. 

Grey’s business manager Edwin G. Bowen directed, produced and edited. It was his first, and his only, feature film and it plays like an embarrassing amateur production. The predominately English voices are just one of its cringe-worthy offerings. So too is the portrayal of First Nations people, the lame comedy and the atrocious acting.

Then there’s the shark. The best parts of White Death are the footage of Grey fishing for swordfish. But decent shark footage eluded him, and as for the great white, the crew had to paint one shark white and also construct a model for other shots. The fakery is hopeless, and the pathetic chase for the great white sucks whatever life was left out of the film. 

White Death bombed and there’s no evidence of it ever being released in the USA. 

In 1939, only months before his death in California, Grey caught several great white sharks off Port Lincoln, but the fish of his life, a 17-foot great white escaped.