As the title of C. J. Dennis’s The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke might suggest, its narrative revolves around questions of masculinity, and as early as 1946, Dennis’s biographer, A. H. Chisholm was speculating as to its author’s personal interest in such questions. He wondered whether Dennis’s predilection for “tough” characters in some of his verse was a reaction to the exaggerated mollycoddling of his aunts when he was growing up. [1] The poem was published in 1915 to immediate success, and remains the best-selling volume of Australian verse, with more than 300,000 copies having been published by the late 1970s. [2]
Raymond Longford’s silent film, The Sentimental Bloke (Australia 1919),-a version that closely followed the original narrative-has been described by Joan Long as “one of the best Australian films ever, silent or sound”. [3] Those who have seen F. W. Thring’s talkie of the same name (Australia 1932), with which Dennis was heavily involved, will know that such a claim could never be made of that version. Each film bears traces of Dennis’s personal interest in masculinity, but each was also released in a context when masculinity was an important concern for Australian culture in general-the immediate post war years, and the Great Depression-and each addresses issues directly relevant to those different contexts. This paper is an exploratory look at some of the ways in which the Longford and Thring productions differ from the poem and from each other. Dennis’s connection with the two screen versions has probably been under-examined by film historians. On the other hand, the original poem has been under-examined by literary historians, and much of the excellent work on the Longford version by film researchers provides valuable insights into Dennis’s poem. [4]
Longford’s silent version was made by the Southern Cross Feature Film Company of Adelaide, and it was in Adelaide that Dennis was given a cheque for one thousand pounds as advance royalties; according to Les Blake, this played a considerable part in overcoming his strong reservations about the feasibility of turning his work into a film. Blake suggests that in the negotiations Dennis proved “unexpectedly difficult”, thinking that the film rights might reduce book sales, worrying about how characters would be portrayed, and having doubts about Longford’s and Southern Cross’s credentials in the film industry. [5] Dennis’s own words, used in official programs, support this view:
They were very solid doubts, indeed, that I took along with me to the private screening of the picture; I went expecting, at best, a burlesque, at worst, a fiasco. I came away believing in miracles. The fidelity with which the written story has been converted into what may be termed a visual narrative is amazing to me. The difficulties that I had foreseen have been overcome admirably, and turned into picture triumphs. [6]
Dennis was a skilled promoter of his work, and had run a very clever campaign to publicise The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke; this blurb was intended to assist the film. Privately he was somewhat less effusive, telling his publisher: “The cinema version of the ‘Bloke’ has turned out surprisingly good, though, from the artistic point of view there are many flaws in it. Still it is better than we hoped for”.
There is also other evidence that his reluctance to have a film made of the book should not be taken entirely at face value. In April 1915, Dennis had insisted on inserting a clause retaining “dramatic and moving picture rights” into his contract with Angus & Robertson, and, although he said he “did not intend to do anything in this regard for some time”, by July 1915-still three months before the book was published-he was showing drafts for a “moving picture” version to his friend and mentor, Garry Roberts. [7] Hal Gye’s recollections of the events when “a commercial man” drove up to Dennis’s home in Toolangi, near Healesville, to secure the film rights, indicate that financial motives played at least some part in any reluctance that Dennis exhibited:
Den was washing his dog Mick on the front verandah when the caller arrived and began to get down to business.
Then the battle began: Den calm, cool, indifferent, his eyes piercing and cold, the man important, and Den still scrubbing Mick. And never had Mick had such a long and thorough wash: first the paws then his hide, his ears, and the man’s voice being drowned by the voice of Den calling on Mick: “Turn over, Mick! Come here, Mick! Keep still, Mick! There you old scoundrel, let’s have a go at your dirty ears.” Then with a cool, calm, uninterested and almost bored look at the visitor now and then, Mick had to be dried, and when this also most prolonged and to the man, damned tedious business, had been gone through, then there was the run on the lawn by Mick and then there was Den holding one end of the towel while Mick held the other end fiercely in his gleaming teeth and shook and worried and pulled at the towel pulling Den this way and that way. The man gave up and sat down in the cane lounge and waited. What a strange man not interested in making a lot of money in connection with his book. Thought he’d snap up his offer. Huh!
When Mick and Den had given up playing Den then said off hand like, “How he tries me. Now, let me see, what is it you want? Oh, yes, pictures. Come into my study and we’ll talk.
Half an hour afterwards the visitor came out of the study with Den and Den saw him up to the road, where they both shook hands cordially. When Den returned to the house I said, “Fancy taking all that time to wash Mick while the man was waiting to make you an offer for the picture rights.”
“Yes,” said Den laughing. “That special marathon bath put just on one thousand pounds in my pocket.” [8]
Clearly the creator of The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke saw himself as an operator, and was keen to gain the maximum fee.
The poem was essentially episodic in structure, with a focus on exploring the situations that were loosely held together by the narrative. Longford was grateful that Dennis “offered no suggestions or interfered in any way with the making of the film whatsoever”, [9] but, in his turn, the director tried very hard to remain true to the original, keeping this structure, but giving more emphasis to the story, cutting out some episodes, abbreviating the others-often heavily- and re-ordering some events. So, although Dennis was not personally involved in its making, his narrative and characterisation were at the heart of the film.
Perhaps the most significant effect of the relatively minor changes that Longford made was to strengthen the central character’s drive for upward mobility. This became much more than just the loose thread holding separate episodes together, as it had been in the poem. And, in an era of national rebuilding after the war, an emphasis on success through hard work was a much more relevant ideology than when the poem was first published. However, for a country in which the normative version of manhood was becoming increasingly that of the breadwinner, Longford’s reworking also has the effect of considerably strengthening the Bloke’s demonstration of his credentials as a good provider for a household.
Where the original begins with Bill pining for love, the film opens with his gambling, arrest and time in gaol. And his unhappiness is attributed to remorse at doing time, rather than to the feelings that come with spring. Instead of beginning with a springtime “yearnin’ fer-I dunno wot”, the film draws attention to the moral and economic depths to which he has sunk, and his inappropriateness as a breadwinner, so that it can chart his gradual rise. Where the poem ignores his form of employment until he explains to Doreen’s mother that he has a job as a storeman in a printer’s joint, early on in the film he gets a job hawking, and later graduates to the printery. The film adds a scene which shows Bill preparing for meeting his future mother-in-law by reading Etiquette for Australians, and there is an intertitle with the words: “I studies books wiv yearnin’ to improve,/To ‘eave meself out uv me lowly groove”. In the poem, these words come in the last chapter, and are in the context of a rejection of book learning in favour of “the wisdom o’ the ‘eart”. [10]
One of the more significant ways in which the film text shifted its focus onto what might today be called “aspirational” values is in the mise-en-scène. In the poem there are no descriptions of the poverty from which the chief protagonist emerges, although it is there by implication. In the film, there is priceless footage of the slums of Wooloomooloo in 1918, underlining his origins. The British Kine weekly said of The Sentimental Bloke: “It is so perfect that at times we are almost tempted to think” that the figures on screen “are not players at all, but men and women of the slums, who, by some miracle performed by a master-producer, have been enabled to enact their lives before the camera”. [11]
In fact, casting must have presented a very serious challenge to the film-maker, aware that the audience would have pre-conceived notions from their familiarity with Dennis’s verse, and Longford spent considerable time hunting for an appropriate “Bloke”, [12] one able to depict the correct balance between blokedom and sentimentality. Stephen Garton has written that for the men coming home from the war “return seemed to represent a direct conflict between their ‘maleness’, newly strengthened at the front, and its opposite-a stifling feminised world”. [13] Elsewhere, Garton argues that the conflict between the different models of masculinity-domestic and masculinist-identified by Marilyn Lake in her discussion of the 1890s, remained “a persistent tension” in the years after the war. [14] The fact that Dennis’s book and Longford’s film revolved around this tension and its resolution, illustrates that it did, indeed, persist. The narrative depicts neither the defeat of one model by the other, nor a long-standing opposition; instead it shows a continuity, asserting that masculinist men can choose love and domesticity. Sentimentality emerges from blokedom; adult manhood is finally equated with being a good husband and a good father, but that kind of man can originate in larrikinism.
In the book, Dennis explicitly intended Hal Gye’s illustrations to help achieve this resolution between masculine types, and he told his publishers that he wanted them ‘to be aesthetic enough to balance the coarseness of the dialect and emphasize the sentiment. [15] When the author suggested cupids, his illustrator was initially sceptical, but the result was to contribute considerably to the public’s openness to the main character.
At a first glance, Longford appears to have ignored the cherubic figures entirely: Tauchert’s physique was conventionally masculine, and evidently he knew how to use it. According to Picture Show, during the filming of the fight scene between the Bloke and a policeman Longford told his male lead that he could have “a real ding-dong go”, an instruction that Tauchert took literally. Evidently, “It needed seven of the cast to haul the two dirty bleeding actors apart while Longford danced around the melee yelling that he hadn’t told Tauchert to kill him”. [16] On the other hand, Tauchert’s facial expressions retained an innocence, and were able to reveal the strength of his love for Doreen; the shot of him weeping with remorse after his night on the town is a memorable image of deep feeling in a tough body. He “faces the world with a blend of aggressiveness and bewilderment, of swagger and shyness, of resentment that life should be dishing it out to him, yet readiness to meet whatever comes. Despite his urge to stoush cops and beat up his rival lover, he remains innocent and vulnerable”. [17]
Long suggests that the Frank Thring talkie, released in 1932, is “another illustration of the often-proved rule that authors should not adapt their own works for the screen”. [18] Dennis had assigned the stage and film rights to Thring on 14 February 1931 for £2,000, and the contract included his agreeing to “make the necessary adaptations and alterations … for the Cinematograph”. [19]
Where the Longford film followed the narrative that held together the episodes in Dennis’s original verses, the Thring film makes some more substantial changes, the principal of which is the introduction of a new and complicated story about Uncle Jim, that drives much of the action. In both poem and silent film, Uncle Jim arrives out of the blue towards the end, and his offer of a fruit farm is a convenient way to bring events to a conclusion. In the talkie, however, Uncle Jim is living as a boarder in Doreen’s house from the start, and much of the film is devoted to an attempt by a seedy character to swindle the country yokel, who has found gold on his property and who hopes to establish a mine there.
Presumably for an audience devastated by the depression, a tale of upward mobility had its own specific attractions. Certainly, the 1932 film emphasises the possibility of a rise in fortunes in various ways. One is the potential goldmine on Uncle Jim’s farm, which, unfortunately turns out to be evidence of yokel stupidity. Another is through the Bloke’s marriage to Doreen, who, although not wealthy in her own right, comes with a farm attached, as the audience is informed very early in the film. As well as coming with property, Doreen is clearly from another class, speaking largely with what linguists have called a “cultivated Australian” accent-a feature of early attempts to adapt to sound, as Susan Dermody points out. [20] Even though she is supposed to work in a pickle factory, this film doesn’t show her doing so, and leaves her actual occupation in the factory undefined.
But much of the stress on the possibility of upward mobility is again concerned with Bill’s credentials as a breadwinner-an acute concern in a society where unemployment threatened this central component of a sense of manhood. The requirement to be able to support a wife and family is made more explicit than in the Longford film. When Doreen reveals that she already knows about Bill’s gaol term, and does not mind, it seems that she is going to say she likes him for what he is. Instead, her words are: “It’s not what you were that matters to me; it’s what you’re going to be”. And in this film there is more emphasis on the hard work required of someone providing for a household. When Bill indicates that he’d like to marry her, Doreen says sternly: “It needs money to be married, and you’ve only just got a job”. He replies, reassuringly: ‘I know. But I can work-work like blazes.”
In a period where the depression had given many Australian men’s sense of their manhood a battering, it is perhaps not surprising that the 1932 film displays much more nervousness about masculinity than either of the two previous versions. But as well as these social reasons for such a shift, Dennis’s own experience of marriage may have been relevant; his wife’s reminiscences, Down the years [21] , reveal that their marriage had many tensions and that she was a feisty woman. The original poem and the 1919 film were an interesting use of what has often been called “feminine romance”, but with the sexes reversed-the narrative is related through a male voice; it is driven by male desire for a partner; and the traditional rival from a higher social class is male. [22] In addition both poem and silent film seem comfortable with a stereotypical Australian bloke’s tears.
One of the ways the 1932 film betrays its unease about masculinity is through a nervous joking at any even faint departure by the chief protagonist from its normative version of masculine behaviour. The first action in the Thring film is a two up game. When Bill says to Ginger that he is seven quid up and wants to quit, Ginger labels him a “careful little housewife”. A little later, when it is clear that Bill is in love with a woman, he suggests that he and Ginger meet in the botanic gardens. Ginger’s response is: “what do you want me to do-to go picking violets?” And then when they are parting, Ginger says, camping it up: “In the Gardens, Gertie. I’ll be there”. For this film, being in love with a woman is an expression of effeminacy. In appearance, the 1932 bloke, played by Cecil Scott, is much closer to the Hollywood ideal of a leading man, and is therefore, paradoxically, much less stereotypically masculine than Arthur Tauchert.
Another response to the 1932 film’s unease is to reassert masculine boundaries. When Doreen’s mother reveals that she has shooed away a larrikin, Uncle Jim says, “that’s man’s work”, and wishes that she would leave it to him. In addition, one of the effects of adding the attempt to swindle the uncle is to displace the narrative drive from the bloke’s pursuit of Doreen-the feminine romance-to a much more masculine structure. The new complicated storyline allows the bloke to prove his manhood both by admitting that he has been a gaolbird, and by heroically preventing the swindling.
In its examination of the relationship between Bill and Doreen, the Thring film is much more interested in the question of control. Where the earlier versions had the Bloke resolving to give up his larrikin ways of his own accord, and had Doreen forgiving him when he regressed, the 1932 version has Doreen trying much harder to control her man by extracting a range of promises from him. In the poem and silent version, the lovers’ falling out is over Bill’s jealousy; in the talkie it is over his breaking the promise about fighting. Indeed, breaking the promise to his future wife becomes an assertion of masculinity endorsed by the film: Bill says that he could not call himself a man, if he did not “stoush” the bad guys.
The Thring film raises male bonding to an important theme in its examination of Australian masculinity. Longford’s 1919 version had already made Ginger Mick slightly more prominent in the story than the original poem-given the success of Dennis’s sequel, The Moods of Ginger Mick, in 1916, audiences would have expected this. Longford has Mick present from the start, and gives him a role in getting the two lovers back together after their tiff. But this is nothing in comparison with the 1932 elevation of Ginger Mick. Most revealing in the talkie’s treatment of male bonding as a central concern is the discussion that ends with Doreen hoping the bonds between husband and wife will be an imitation of the real and deep connection between mates.
In an era when for many men, unemployment-or uncertainty about employment-might have been a threat to a sense of manhood, this film transforms a narrative that was centrally about a man’s desire for partnership with a woman into one where that bond was clearly not as significant as the bond between men. Ginger Mick’s importance to the Bloke puts Doreen in her place. And, in introducing Mick into the rural idyll at the end, the Thring film puts the original and Longford’s celebration of domestic bliss into the context of mateship; Mick’s final decision to return to the city is rued by both Bill and Doreen.
Dennis’s own interest in what it meant to be a man in Australian culture, a question that occupied him throughout his life, had some impact on the forms of the Bloke narrative as it appeared in the Longford film and as he reworked it for the 1932 talkie. But masculinity was also a pressing issue for Australian culture in general in the immediate postwar years and in the context of the depression, and both films contained representations and narratives that grappled with those issues specific to their own times. In line with the fact that the normative version of manhood was becoming increasingly that of breadwinner, Longford emphasises the Bloke’s credentials as a provider for a household. By the time of Thring’s film, Australian masculinity has undergone such a battering that it is necessary to prove that the Bloke is not a “careful little housewife”.
Endnotes
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[1] A. H. Chisholm, The Making of a Sentimental Bloke: A Sketch of the Remarkable Career of C. J. Dennis (Melbourne: Georgian House, 1946), 3.
[2] Ian McLaren, C. J. Dennis: A Supplement to a Comprehensive Bibliography Together with a Connsolidated Index to the Compiler’s Dennis Publications (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1983), 143.
[3] Joan Long, “The Sentimental Bloke on celluloid”, The World of The Sentimental Bloke, comp. Barry Watts (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1976), 115.
[4] Particularly Ina Bertrand, “The Sentimental Bloke: narrative and social consensus”, Screening the Past: Aspects of Early Australian Film, ed. Ken Berryman (Canberra: National Film & Sound Archive, 1995) 97-106, but also John Tulloch, Legends on the Screen: The Narrative Film in Australia 1919-1929 (Sydney: Currency/AFI, 1981) and David Boyd, “The public and private lives of a sentimental bloke”, Cinema Journal 37, no. 4 (1998): 3-18.
[5]Les Blake, “The Sentimental Bloke on screen: a stoush with the yanks”, Victorian Historical Journal 64, no. 1 (1993): 28-29.
[6] Papers of C. J. Dennis and Hal Gye collected by Harry F. Chaplin, National Library of Australia MS 6480/22.
[7]Ian McLaren, Talking about C. J. Dennis (Melbourne: English Dept., Monash Univ, 1982), 13.
[8]Hal Gye, “The Story of C. J. Dennis”, Papers of C. J. Dennis and Hal Gye collected by Harry F. Chaplin, National Library of Australia MS 6480/100, 14-15.
[9] Raymond Longford to H. L. White, 23 March 1958, “Raymond Longford Assorted Papers”, Screensound Australia MSS 0392164/2. I would like to thank Marilyn Dooley for her generous help in locating this source.
[10] C. J. Dennis, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1915), 112.
[11] Quoted in Tulloch, 57.
[12] H. K. Carhall, “The Sentimental Bloke“, Picture Show, 25 October 1919, reprinted in An Australian Film Reader, ed., Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan (Sydney: Currency 1985), 34-35.
[13] Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return, (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996), 22.
[14] Stephen Garton, “War and masculinity in twentieth century Australia”, Australian Masculinities: Men and their Histories, ed., Clive Moore and Kay Saunders (St. Lucia; Qld: U of Queensland P, 1998), 93; Marilyn Lake, “The politics of respectability: identifying the masculinist context’, Historical Studies, 22, no. 86 (1986): 116-31.
[15] Dennis to Angus & Robertson, 8 April 1915, Mitchell Library MSS 314/24.
[16] Picture Show 19 April 1919, quoted in Blake, 33.
[17] Long, 119.
[18] Long, 121.
[19] C. J. Dennis to F. W. Thring, “Assignment of stage and cinematograph rights in ‘The Sentimental Bloke‘”, Screensound Australia MSS 210025.
[20] Susan Dermody, “Two remakes: ideologies of film production 1919-1932,” in Nellie Melba, Ginger Meggs and Friends :Essays in Australian Cultural History, ed. Susan Dermody, et al. (Malmesbury, Vic.: Kibble Books, 1982), 45.
[21] Margaret Herron, Down the Years (Melbourne: Hallcraft, 1953).
[22] Bertrand, 101.
Created on: Friday, 30 April 2004 | Last Updated: 30-Apr-04