John Baxter's Adventures in the Movie Trade (7) - Encounters with Cecil Holmes

Such was the sense of privilege and isolation prevailing at the Australian Commonwealth Film Unit’s studios in suburban Sydney during my time there in the nineteen-sixties that revelations of covert surveillance and security investigations shocked us more than they might have, say, the Post Office.

During the days of “full disclosure” towards the end of the century, evidence emerged that the Security Services had monitored the CFU, and that even Producer-in-Chief Stanley Hawes (left), a byword for stodginess, was suspected of Communist sympathies. An anonymous member of the staff had acted as informer.  I must have stood high on his (or her) list of suspicious characters, since, according to an exposé of those hotbeds of sedition, film societies, the covert Red within them was “a battler for discussion groups, purely for the use he can make of them in thought-direction. For the same reason he is in favour of the society running a journal. He’s sold on the idea of a film-society federation, for concentration of power in a few hands has long been the goal towards which he has worked. With such power he can hope to swing the film society movement his way, import more films to be used in the fight against freedom and get more backing for his censorship quarrels.”* 

And there I was, a film society organiser, editor of its journal, and a card-carrying campaigner against censorship. How long before I found myself in some anonymous prison cell, detained at the pleasure of ASIO?

To further damn myself, I’d become friendly with newspaper editor and film-maker Cecil Holmes (right).  

As an unapologetic leftist and friend of many more, Cecil definitely qualified as “bad company”. Watching him wander dolefully around Lindfield, peering into each office until he found the one assigned to him, it was difficult to equate him with the International Communist Conspiracy.  However, this vagueness was calculated. With it, he’d lulled bankers, newspaper publishers, film producers and government departments into giving him the tools necessary to undermine all of them. 

Born in New Zealand, Cecil, then a union official, prudently decamped to Australia when some of his incendiary internal memos came to light. With no other work in sight, he took a factory job making auto tyres. 

Title Card

Applying at the CFU, he was turned down by Stanley Hawes who, according to Cecil, made it clear he “would not have his particular government boat rocked by the presence of some trouble-making Red.” Undeterred, Cecil found private money to make a feature film, the 1951 bush-ranging adventure, Captain Thunderbolt. Though it was at least as proficient as most low-budget American films, the two largest Australian theatre chains, Hoyts and Greater Union, largely British-owned, refused to screen it. The decision most probably reflected a desire to protect their lucrative monopoly, but Cecil and his friends understandably suspected political bias.  

Suspicion became certainty following the fate of Cecil’s next feature. Frank Hardy (right) was the socialist author of the 1950 novel Power Without Glory, a roman a clef about a ruthless Victorian politico involved in murders, bombings, thuggery, racketeering and blackmail. When established presses refused to handle the book, Hardy published it himself, with covert help from the Australian Communist Party, and so got to keep all of the considerable income. 

Just back from overseas with pockets full of royalties, Hardy offered some to Cecil to film his short story The Load of Wood, about men on a make-work road-mending job during the Depression who assert themselves by stealing firewood from a landowner and distributing it to the poor. 

So successful was the result that Cecil raised money to shoot two more shorts, and combined them as Three in One.Not really expecting either Hoyts or Greater Union to accept the film, he hoped it might have a better chance if showcased at the 1956 Sydney Film Festival. The then-director, David Donaldson, was ready to screen it, until a contingent from his committee demanded a preview. “Quite a large ad hoc panel arrived, to my surprise,” Donaldson recalled. “I thought the film had substantial, indeed exciting merits, together with the over-statement that one came to recognise as Cecil Holmes’ style. But everyone seemed to be down on the film, even before we discussed it.” Three in One wasn’t shown at the Festival, nor anywhere else, although one episode, the rambling and bucolic Joe Wilson’s Mates, about union members in a country town boozily collaborating to bury a fellow unionist found dead on the road, was extracted and used as a short to cheer up audiences at Alfred Hitchcock’s grim drama of mistaken identity, The Wrong Man.

After a few more films, equally unsuccessful, Cecil drifted into the editorship of a small newspaper in Darwin, from where he began slipping into aboriginal territories, officially barred to journalists, and filming the complaints of their aggrieved inhabitants. 

Gentle Strangers

This scandal was still rumbling when Cecil turned up at the Film Unit. With covert help from fellow left-wingers such as Richard Mason, the Unit had hired him to make a feature-length film called Gentle Strangers, about newly arrived Asian emigrants. 

Cecil and I became friends in the few months he was there, but I didn’t see him again for fifteen years, by which time I was producing a books program for ABC Radio and he had just published his memoir, One Man’s Way.

When he wandered into my ABC office in 1986, it was evident, however, that nothing had changed in his career. 

“What happened to Gentle Strangers?,” I asked. “I never saw it.”

“Almost nobody did. Stanley didn’t like it. Neither did the Department. They cut seventeen minutes, and put it out on TV at 58 minutes. Didn’t make a lot of sense.”

He didn’t sound resentful. With Cecil, one always felt that what mattered most was not to win – which he believed impossible in practice, given Australia’s innate repression - but to go down fighting.The blurb on One Man‘s Way got it right. "Quixotic, rebellious and drawn to trouble, Cecil Holmes belongs to a rare breed of radical adventurers who never give up."

Our programme about Cecil, scheduled to run thirty minutes, was being overseen by X, a recently appointed producer, who, though known as a playwright and novelist, was new to radio. I gave him the tape of my hour’s conversation with Cecil, together with suggestions for editing, and thought no more about it until a day before the broadcast, when I went into the studio to record the links.

X handed the edited tape to the engineer, who looked puzzled. 

“Bit short, isn’t it?”

He was right. At most, the tape would run ten minutes.

We both looked at X. “I thought I got the length right,” he said uncertainly.

“Well, no matter,” I said. “We can go back to the master.”

“Icutthe master,” said X abjectly.

“Then where are the out-takes?”

“In the bin.” White-faced, X bolted from the cutting room, not to be seen again for the rest of the day.

We salvaged a fifteen-minute programme from the debacle. Cecil wasn’t angry when I told him. Not even surprised. 

“It’s OK, mate. I’m used to it.”

“I’m sure it was just inexperience on X’s part,” I protested. “He would never….”

 “You can’t beat ‘em, mate. Believe me.”

“Butreally….”

“John, it’s OK.” He patted my shoulder. “Listen, I’ll see you around.”

He wandered off down the corridor. I watched him go. 

Surely X didn’t…..Surely the ABC wouldn’t….

Would they?

Then I remembered. Not for nothing was the BBC George Orwell’s inspiration for 1984

* Cited in https://www.davidmcknight.com.au/archives/2005/08/australian-film-and-cultural-cold-war