The Sundowners
Fred Zinnemann (1960)
At a crisis point in Fred Zinnemann’s Oklahoma! (1955), the aging Aunt Ella urges the ingénue Laurie to ‘be hearty’. Zinnemann seems to have carried that advice over into The Sundowners, a very different tale about pioneer spirits. The setting this time is the Australian outback: adapted by Isobel Lennart from a novel by John Cleary, the main subject is the tension between the wanderlust of sheep-herder Paddy Carmody and the desire of his wife Ida to settle down in one place. (Late on in the film, we learn that the title refers to the principal characters, not to their drinking habits. Sundowners, according to the Australian rather than the British meaning of the word, are vagrants: people who spend their nights wherever the sun sets on them.) The movie begins with the Carmodys, Paddy and Ida and their teenage son Sean, arriving at a new port of call. It ends with them moving on elsewhere. Being hearty has its benefits here: it’s a quality which is, in very different ways, usually lacking in Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr and the performances Zinnemann gets from them are refreshing (and, thanks to the pair’s congenital lack of exuberance, far from overpowering). But there’s a forced wholesomeness to the proceedings too. The Sundowners, set in the 1950s, was a virtually contemporary piece yet the heartiness seems designed to evoke an earlier (Wild West) age of simple, straightforward relationships between men and women. Paddy and Ida evidently have a good sex life yet they lack a sexual consciousness. This applies even more to Sean, in Michael Anderson Jr’s enthusiastically wooden playing of the role anyway. All this comes over as a kind of rough and ready chasteness. I find it credibly Australian but somehow embarrassing to watch.
As the later The Day of the Jackal also showed, Zinnemann doesn’t have – or isn’t able to express – anything like as nuanced and intuitive a feel for non-American characters as he does for American ones. To put it simply, this master director of actors playing Americans doesn’t seem to notice their shortcomings when they’re playing a different nationality. Kerr and Mitchum are admirable; Peter Ustinov and Glynis Johns, as English expatriates, do entertaining theatrical turns (even if Ustinov is a bit too knowing). But there’s some very awkward playing from, as well as Anderson, the likes of Dina Merrill, John Meillon and especially Ewen Solon. (The excellent Mervyn Johns, Glynis’s father, has a good bit though.) There’s good chemistry between Mitchum and Kerr – he’s more emotionally open than usual and physically she’s remarkably convincing. She also seems unusually inside the character (as she is in From Here to Eternity – it’s as if doing an accent gives her a compass). The screening at BFI was introduced by a Kerr fan: although I couldn’t share his enthusiasm, it was very likeable.
The Sundowners is a curious mixture. Zinnemann seems to be attempting something which must have been difficult (and have seemed novel) for a Hollywood picture of the time – trying to create the texture of a community, sometimes in an almost documentary style. The landscapes (very few houses in a vast orangey dryness) and the observational elements (rounding up the sheep and shearing them: a process that involves an odd physical intimacy between the men and the animals) are striking – although the dramatic episodes that make up the movie are too neatly defined. Zinnemann’s restraint in the potentially melodramatic ones, such as Ida’s discovery that Paddy has gambled away the savings that would have allowed the Carmodys to buy their own farm, is very effective. And Deborah Kerr is beautifully expressive, when Ida joyfully finds her husband alive after the forest fire she fears has killed him and as she sits alongside a stationary train and watches a well-dressed woman through the train window. (It’s a nice irony that the train moves on but Ida envies the fine clothes which bespeak an essentially non-itinerant way of life.)
In other sections, Zinnemann doesn’t seem to be able to find a tone – for example, a meant-to-be comical sheep-shearing contest between Paddy and a local geriatric who displays improbable and invincible stamina (which isn’t explained). The climax to the film is disappointing – in spite of Ida’s startlingly candid announcement to her son that ‘If I choose between you and your father, I’ll choose him every time’, and some good horse racing sequences. Paddy wants to own a successful racehorse (ridden by Sean) and Ida wants to stay put. Neither gets what they want but when Paddy consoles Ida with that thought, the fact that he does get what he wants – by moving on – is overlooked, to anti-climactic effect. I could have done too without Dmitri Tiomkin’s score, which is incongruously over-explanatory.
3 October 2010