Pacific Adventure

Pacific Adventure (1946)

Smithy

An Australian biopic about the life of pioneering aviator Charles "Smithy" Kingsford-Smith. The film is unusually frank about the controversies that occasionally dogged him. PG Taylor and Billy Hughes both make appearances playing themselves.

Date of release
1946-06-26
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (6)
Runtime
1h 59m
Genres
History
Director
Ken G. Hall

Casting

Interesting facts

Smithy is a 1946 Australian adventure film about pioneering Australian aviator Sir Charles Kingsford Smith directed by Ken G. Hall starring Ron Randell. It was Hall's last feature film as a director and has been called "a remarkably adult and downbeat movie, easily Hall’s most mature work in his career".

Development

Smithy was the idea of N.P. Pery, the managing director of Columbia Pictures in Australia. The Australian government had restricted the export of capital during the war, and Pery thought making a film could use up some of that money. Pery was quoted as saying "I do not think I am indulging in Utopian fancies when I say that Australia, or rather, some spot in Australia, could be made the Hollywood of the British Commonwealth."

Pery approached Ken G. Hall, who was Australia's most commercially successful director, and asked him to make a film about an Australian who was well known internationally. Hall wrote that he briefly considered Don Bradman but dismissed the idea because Bradman was not known in the United States. The three main candidates were Ned Kelly, Dame Nellie Melba and Charles Kingsford Smith.

The story of a man who enters a glamorous, dangerous industry, and achieves a lot of success and acclaim, but can never quite succeed in establishing a workable long-term business model in said industry, who is constantly scrounging for finance, going around with a cap in hand to government officials and financiers for more money, being endlessly criticised by know-it-alls, and who is aware of the importance of publicity and a strong team.

Hall commissioned treatments from several writers, including Jesse Lasky, Jr., who was then stationed at Cinesound Productions with the US Signal Corps; Josephine O'Neill, a Sydney film critic; Kenneth Slessor, film critic and poet; and Max Afford, one of Australia's leading playwrights and radio writers. Early drafts focused on Smithy's first flight across the Pacific but then Hall decided to cover most of Smithy's life.

Hall felt Afford's version was the best and the two of them developed a detailed treatment. Afford signed a contract in June 1944.

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

Recommended