Scobie Malone

Scobie Malone (1975)

A detective caught in the web of blackmail, intrigue and murder

Sydney homicide detective Sergeant Scobie Malone and his offsider investigate the murder of Helga, whose corpse is found in the basement of the Sydney Opera House.

Date of release
1975-10-03
TMDB
5.0 / 10 (10)
Runtime
1h 38m
Genres
Crime, Drama, Mystery
Director
Terry Ohlsson

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Helga's Web

Scobie Malone is a 1975 Australian erotic mystery film based on the 1970 novel Helga's Web by Jon Cleary and starring Jack Thompson and Judy Morris.

Production

Jon Cleary's novel Helga's Web was his second featuring the detective Scobie Malone. The first, The High Commissioner, had been turned into a 1968 British-American film starring Rod Taylor as Malone.

The film rights to Helga's Web were originally purchased by Brian Chirlian and John Shore, who hired Cleary to write a screenplay. Casey Robinson, a famous Hollywood screenwriter who had retired to Sydney three years earlier with his Australian wife Joan, then became involved as producer. He did not like Cleary's adaptation and elected to write the script himself in collaboration with another writer.

According to The Bulletin, "in Jon Cleary’s novel [Malone] takes his ironing home every week to his mother and has been known to drink at a Leagues Club. Scobie as Jack Thompson plays him in the film lives in a singles apartment building with a

swimming pool and a lot of topless neighbors and has air hostesses for breakfast."

Robinson managed to pre-sell the film to America, one of the first times this had been done for an Australian film. US$200,000 of the budget was raised from the Australian Film Development Corporation, with the rest coming from private investment.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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