Australian cinema hadn’t made much of a mark internationally before The Australian New Wave hit in the mid ’70s through the very early ’80s.
In a flash, Australian history, culture, character and mores were broadcast to the big wide world through such classic films as “Walkabout,” “The Last Wave,” “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” “My Brilliant Career,” “Mad Max,” “Gallipoli” and “Breaker Morant.”
Stars such as Mel Gibson, Judy Davis, Bryan Brown, Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill rode that wave to Hollywood. And directors burst through, as filmmakers from Peter Weir and Fred Schepisi to Gillian Armstrong and Bruce Beresford became mainstream stars behind the camera, making hits and even blockbusters in Hollywood.
But such filmmakers’ piercing and often askance view of their own culture, via their early films, is what cineastes still gravite towards.
“Breaker Morant” (1980) was Beresford’s big break, a combat film about the largely forgotten “first modern guerilla war,” the Boer War, and a courtroom drama about how such “irregular forces” wars render their combatants capable of inhuman crimes.
“Breaker Morant” was taken as a Vietnam allegory in the U.S. and elsewhere, and as a rallying cry for Australian sovereignty and against English classism and disdain for all things Oz, thanks to a “kangaroo court” court-martial that condemned Australian soldiers serving in South Africa condemned for, as they insisted, “following orders.”
The film, which stretches history to its breaking point in some cases and finds deeper truth in others, looks at how the expediencies of war and the nature of tit-for-tat guerilla conflicts dehumanizes even the humane. But it’s been embraced for something else that’s nakedly obvious to any viewer — nascent Australian nationalism, and Australian victimhood at the hands of the prejudiced empire that sent their “worst” to a country that started life as a penal colony
So Beresford saying “I always get amazed when people say to me that this is a film about poor Australians who were framed by the Brits” seems as patronizing as “Driving Miss Daisy,” which he also directed.
Watching “Breaker Morant” nearly half a century after its release it seems obvious that Beresford and the play and thinly-researched historical novel the film is based on sanitize and heroize a fairly unsavory title character. The immigrant turned horse “breaker,” pathological liar about his background, check-kiting, debt-dodging coward — according to some accounts — was British and insisted on being labeled as such, if that’s any consolation to Australian nationalists who see him as a symbolic hero.
The film is still brilliantly realized on all counts — a period piece of dazzling detail and grimly realized “irregular” combat and summary executions, with terrific, career-making performances by Edward Woodward (TV’s original “Equalizer”), Bryan Brown (“F/X,” “The Thorn Birds”) and Jack Thompson (“Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,””The Great Gatsby”).
Woodward has the title role, that of a gruff older lieutenant with a poetic bent. We even see and hear him singing in a flashback that takes him back to his last visit to England.
The narrative is a flashback framed within the trial thrown together by British command in the “dirty war” against the Boers. Three lieutenants, played by Woodward, Brown and Lewis Fitz-Gerald, are accused of shooting prisoners and murdering a German Lutheran missionary. The actual case involved six officers and a wider-ranging set of charges, and the trial’s proceedings were covered up for years after it took place.
Thompson plays the inexperienced Australian solicitor ordered to defend the accused, Major Thomas. He proves up to the challenge, if not able to get around a court-martial triumvirate ordained to convict and shoot these men as quickly as possible as a sop to a possible peace settlement, and as a message to Australians still clinging to their rough and unruly image.
Woodward’s performance allows for moments of fury and florid poetry, and the occasional court outburst in and out of testimony.
“It is customary in a war to kill as many of the enemy as possible,” Morant acidly sneers at his officer class inquisitors.
Not actually a professional soldier, certainly not a career one, Morant (not his real name) is still astute enough to see this as “a new kind of war…We were out on the veldt, fighting the Boer the way he fought us. I’ll tell you what rule we applied, sir. We applied Rule 3-0-3!”
That’s the name and caliber of the British 303 rifle they fought with and used in their firing squads in a “no prisoners” campaign that the accused insist was not just officially sanctioned, but ordered from on high.
It’s no wonder this film was spun as a Vietnam War allegory in the States, with its “whatever works” against a slippery enemy ethics, impulsive reprisals and echoes of My Lai.
The Australian-as-South-African locations recreate the treeless emptiness of a country torn by a war mostly caused by British imperialism, in the person of immigrants pouring in for the gold, cheap land and diamonds and expecting to vote the Dutch and disenfranchised native Africans out of power and say in the region’s future, immigrants backed by invading British armies.
The action is limited, but realistic — even the fictional attack on their garrison that has our three imprisoned soldiers released to fight and save the day, a feature of many a Western.
But what stands out about “Breaker Morant” 45 years after its release is its Australian outrage, the sense that the effete Brits were and are still putting down Oz as a land of brawling, beer-drinking brutes, which cuts at the very core of that hard -and-that-makes-hard-men heritage that’s become a national brand.
And whatever Beresford still says that his breakthrough film is about, that message is but one of several this masterful and sweeping cinematic story sent and continues to send, even as scholars in the intervening years fill in the last blanks of demythologizing the man and that dirty war’s dirty court-martial that was his undoing.
Rating: TV-PG, combat violence, sexual situations, profanity
Cast: Edward Woodward, Bryan Brown, Lewis Fitz-Gerald, John Waters, Vincent Ball, Terence Donovan, Alan Cassell and Jack Thompson.
Credits: Directed by Bruce Beresford, scripted by Jonathan Hardy, David Stevens and Bruce Beresford, based on a play by Kenneth G. Ross and an historical novel by Kit Denton. A New World release on HDNet TV, Amazon, other streamers
Running time: 1:47
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