Cast Mates: Australian Actors in Hollywood and at Home (Sam Twyford-Moore, NewSouth)

Sam Twyford-Moore set out to write a cultural history of Australian cinema in Cast Mates: Stories of Australians in film, but covering 127 years of boom and bust was always going to be a challenge. To counter, Twyford-Moore looks to the lives of Australian film stars to bridge the gaps: he says because actors shape ‘cultural and national identity’ and they’re ‘closer to centres of power than other artists’. ‘You’ve got me, let’s go!’ I thought. Errol Flynn’s bio proves no Fantales wrapper—a slave trader in Papua New Guinea before Hollywood, where he allegedly became a rapist and enabled paedophile. Peter Finch takes us to the British stage alongside Vivien and Olivier before he snatches a posthumous Academy Award for ‘Mad as Hell’ Howard Beale in Network. Traversing Walkabout to Ten Canoes, Twyford-Moore imagines Gulpilil subverting colonialist expectation as the real fish-out-of-water in NYC in the Crocodile Dundee sequel we’d all have paid to see! And Kidman swells a national pride from BMX Bandits and Dead Calm through Tom Cruise and Eyes Wide Shut and back to Oz in Moulin Rouge. It’s quite a ride, but then this cultural history of Australian film ends sans gestalt. Inexplicably, there’s no overall thesis; instead, we get a coda where our author babysits for a new film director and then extras in their low-budget feature. What just happened? Nonetheless, Cast Mates will appeal to readers interested in new cultural histories of Australian cinema.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Dr Michael Kitson trained in film and broadcast TV and worked in film production, cinema exhibition and bookselling. He is a lecturer in creative writing, literature and editing and publishing programmes. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Reviews