The Phantom Stockman

The Phantom Stockman (1953)

HE WAS A LEGEND THAT CAME TO LIFE

Kim Marsden inherits a cattle station near Alice Springs after the death of her father. Kim becomes convinced her father was murdered. She sends for a legendary local bushman called the Sundowner, who was one of her father's best friends.

Date of release
1953-06-19
TMDB
4.9 / 10 (33)
Runtime
1h 7m
Genres
Western
Director
Lee Robinson

Casting

Interesting facts

The Phantom Stockman is a 1953 Australian Western film written and directed by Lee Robinson and starring Chips Rafferty, Victoria Shaw, Max Osbiston and Guy Doleman.

Development

Chips Rafferty and Lee Robinson had both failed to raise finance for individual projects. Rafferty wanted to make a £120,000 13-part series and film, The Green Opal, about immigration problems. Robinson wanted to make a thriller, Saturday to Monday which later became The Siege of Pinchgut. Both were stymied by a government rule at the time which prohibited invent in non-essential industry over £10,000.

The two men knew each other because Robinson wrote scripts for Rafferty's radio show, Chips: the Story of Outback. Both were frustrated at the lack of film production in Australia. They decided to team up together and make a film that cost under £10,000, with Robinson directing and Rafferty starring. (Robinson had experienced directing documentaries and been an assistant on I Found Joe Barton.)

They were joined by cinematographer George Heath and formed Platypus Productions. Said Rafferty at the time:

We nutted it out this way. What's the good of imitating English and American pictures when we can get into places these foreign production units can't reach for sandflies and skeeters? We'll pick locations and backgrounds the world knows nothing about. We'll study them for dramatic values. But we're not buying stories. The stories will just come out of our heads and still leave enough wood to make chairs.

We said, "Let's forget what the Australian public thinks about, what they might take to, because if you put an Australian tag on a film it was the worst possible thing you could do."... The thing was to try and go for different locales and different lines, new material but fairly standard in the international approach... It was something that Les Norman (the producer of Eureka Stockade) said to us.

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

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