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.   

AT CINEMA REBORN - Barrie Pattison's introduction to THE WATCHMAKER OF ST PAUL (repeat screening on Thursday)

Philippe Noiret, The Watchmaker of St Paul

Editor's Note: THE WATCHMAKER OF ST PAUL  drew a very good crowd at its screening at Cinema Reborn in Sydney screens again in Sydney on Thursday 7 May at 4.15pm. It screens in Melbourne at the Hawthorn Lido on Saturday 9 May at 11.40 am, introduced by Andrew McGregor, and on Wednesday 13 May at 4.00pm.

Below is Barrie Pattison's introduction to the first screening in Sydney. The intro wont be repeated on Thursday at the repeat screening at the Randwick Ritz.  Barrie was a friend of director Bertrand Tavernier and his introduction recalls this friendship.

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This is a slightly expanded version of the introduction I did to the 2026 Cinema Reborn screening.

I’m going to give you a little Film History, so here’s an apology to the people who know this already.

The first archival screenings we hear about, happened in the thirties in New York, London and Paris. The French activity was different, not conducted by institutions’ salaried officers  but by enthusiasts who gathered (and sometimes stole) copies which the Companies were discarding as no longer having any value. This appears to have been a boutique activity, with Henri Langlois and Georges Franju storing their prints in Langlois’ mother’s bathroom.

However (and this they don’t tell you) during The Occupation, a German Major put things on a more business-like basis, expanding the collection substantially from a couple of hundred titles (not a year’s programs for a serious Cinémathque). In the post war period, Paris became known as the only place in the world where you could see many important films. People like director Bob Swaim or writer Carlos Clarens came there, because that was where La Cinémathèque Française was.

A devoted core audience watched Langlois’ screenings at night and,  in the day time, wrote for magazines like Positif,  Cahiers de Cinéma, Présence de Cinéma, Cinéma Soixante dix, and the rest. They developed the celebrated Politique des Auteurs which said that movie directors were as much the authors of their work as composers, painters, sculptors and dramatists and they applied it to Hollywood professionals like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, rather than heavyweights like Carl Dreyer or Robert Bresson.

… and they started making films, the celebrated La Nouvelle Vague.

After their phenomenal success with titles like Francois Truffaut’s Four Hundred Blows, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Louis Malle’s Zazie in the Métro, near three hundred films were made by French directors in their twenties. This process was peaking when I arrived there in the early sixties. 

I encountered press agent and critic Bertrand Tavernier, who was already doing episodes for sketch movies. He drew on his enthusiast background, scooping Laetitia Roman’s resumé out of the pile on his table, exclaiming “Gold of the Seven Saints!” and reviving her wilting career giving her the part in  Les baisers.

Shortly after this,  the authorities took the Cinémathèque away from Langlois - and his indignant supporters staged a demonstration outside the Trocadéro auditorium, which turned into a riot when the gendarmes broke it up. Bertrand Tavernier was seen leaving the event with blood streaming down his face. It was the first of the succession of manifestations of May ‘68, reverberating round the world - Le joli mai! 

I can’t help noticing that that messing with La Cinématèque Française brought down the French government while wiping out the Australian National Film Theatre only stirred interest among the people who wanted to make off with its funding and real estate.

Meanwhile Bertrand Tavernier had interested Philippe Noiret in Tavernier’s proposed adaptation of L’Horloger d’Everton, a story by Georges Simenon,  creator of Inspector Maigret. Noiret become a star out of his Nouvelle Vague movies.  His participation ensured finance and the film that you are about to watch was made. Tavernier rejected the night and fog of preceding Simenon productions.  His  L’horloger de St. Paul/The Watchmaker of St. Paul was about May ‘68, most obviously in the motif of the burning car and in Noiret’s final affirmation. But it’s not just a propaganda exercise, also incorporating a study of the Lyons neighbourhood where the work of the plumber, the glazier, the neighbourhood cafe or even the Cathedral where Noiret maintains the steeple clock,  get mixed in with the action. It is also, centrally, a father and son relationship examined in serious detail.

The film was a notable success and Tavernier followed it with other message pieces. I wasn’t the first person to tell him he was repeating himself and he had already set in train his jazz film ‘Round Midnight, the one that emboldened Clint Eastwood into making Bird, and the the first of the productions that turned Tavernier into one of the major film makers of the late 20th Century - Dimanche  dans la Compagne/Sunday in the Country, La Vie et rien d’autre/Life and Nothing But, Laisser passer/Safe Conduct.

However, he remained an enthusiast. He fronted a season of Julien Duvivier’s thirties Harry Baur films. He toured a retrospective of French war movies to promote his Capitain Conan and he was instrumental in setting up a film museum in his Lyons home town, in the building which had housed the Lumière factory, where what is generally considered the first motion picture had been made. He staged a history of westerns there.

I’d watched Tavernier do the sound mix on a couple of reels of l’Horloger de Saint Paul - the railway scene. Tavernier’s wife is the passenger out of focus behind the actors.  (His daughter Tiffany also appears in the opening scene looking at the car burn from the moving carriage window).  Tavernier was actually singing, caught up in the euphoria of starting his dream career. I’d see this a couple of times more - Peter Fonda after Easy Rider came out  and Oliver Stone when Platoon took off. Being part of a community largely made up of wannabe movie directors, however one of the most interesting things I got to do was watching Bertrand Tavernier go the distance.

I’m placing a 1974 interview I did with Tavernier after the London Premier of Watchmaker, on my Sprocket Sources Blog