Founded on one of the twin plots of A. R. Harwood's earlier film Show Business (1938), Night Club concerns a theatre writer, Bill Winters, who decides to spend some time in a country town while seeking space to work on a new musical show. While in the town, he sees a number of local variety acts that he believes have the potential to make it in the city, and subsequently persuades his wealthy father to back his idea for a production in a night club. Despite attempts by a jealous performer to close the show down, it is eventually a success.
Show Business
Frank Morton Chapple
(composer),
( dir. A. R. Harwood
)
1938
Melbourne
:
New Era Film Productions
,
1938
Z1571051
1938
single work
film/TV
Essentially a musical comedy, the story concerns Bill and Wally Winter, two brothers who attempt to persuade their wealthy father, Sir James Winter, to finance both a stage production and a movie that they wish to make. These projects are very much the result of their infatuation with Nina Bellamy, a scheming femme fatale, who has convinced the pair that she should star in both projects. When Sir James becomes aware of Nina's hold on his sons, he makes them a proposition. He will back their projects only if they leave town and work on the shows in secret somewhere else, without telling Nina. Furthermore, they are to use only newly discovered talent. Bill visits a country town where he discovers a talented local group of performers whom he quickly signs up and takes to the city to star in his show. Meanwhile, Wally discovers a girl in a local film exchange, and together they plan to re-release an old Australian silent film with a comic commentary. Complications occur when Nina finds out about the brothers' plans and attempts to wreck their chances of success. When this fails, she tries to blackmail their father. This too fails, and she is finally exposed for who she really is.
Stanley Kramer’s fizzingly apocalyptic On the Beach (1959) dominates and defines popular understandings of Melbourne’s cinematic representation in the 1950s. Shot in the city and its surroundings from January to March 1959, and released internationally towards the end of the year, both the film and Nevil Shute’s source novel have been highly influential in reinforcing and promoting specific understandings of 1950s Melbourne as a staid, sleepy, uneventful and architecturally conservative metropolis. This hard-to-shake view of Melbourne has been further compounded by the lack of comparative feature film images of the city (a brief view in 1952’s Road to Bali excepted) and its appearance in such international documentaries as The Melbourne Rendezvous (1957). But Melbourne does appear more dynamically in a range of less noted and disparate short films, mini-features and documentaries produced by government funded entities like the Australian National Film Board and the State Film Centre of Victoria, small production entities formed around the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Melbourne (often made by major Melbourne architects such as Robin Boyd and Peter McIntyre) and the Melbourne University Film Society, and such maverick independent filmmakers as Giorgio Mangiamele. Many of the works also provide a more critical, though at times celebratory, view of the changing cityscape of Melbourne (height limits for buildings were “exploded” by the completion of ICI House in 1958), the tentative embrace of modernity and internationalisation (e.g. the impact of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics) and the changing ethnicities of the inner city and suburbs. This essay maps and challenges broader understandings of Melbourne’s filmic representation in the 1950s by exploring the various ways in which the city is figured in unjustly forgotten or marginalised films like The Melbourne Wedding Belle (1953), Your House and Mine (1954) and Sunday in Melbourne (1958).
Stanley Kramer’s fizzingly apocalyptic On the Beach (1959) dominates and defines popular understandings of Melbourne’s cinematic representation in the 1950s. Shot in the city and its surroundings from January to March 1959, and released internationally towards the end of the year, both the film and Nevil Shute’s source novel have been highly influential in reinforcing and promoting specific understandings of 1950s Melbourne as a staid, sleepy, uneventful and architecturally conservative metropolis. This hard-to-shake view of Melbourne has been further compounded by the lack of comparative feature film images of the city (a brief view in 1952’s Road to Bali excepted) and its appearance in such international documentaries as The Melbourne Rendezvous (1957). But Melbourne does appear more dynamically in a range of less noted and disparate short films, mini-features and documentaries produced by government funded entities like the Australian National Film Board and the State Film Centre of Victoria, small production entities formed around the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Melbourne (often made by major Melbourne architects such as Robin Boyd and Peter McIntyre) and the Melbourne University Film Society, and such maverick independent filmmakers as Giorgio Mangiamele. Many of the works also provide a more critical, though at times celebratory, view of the changing cityscape of Melbourne (height limits for buildings were “exploded” by the completion of ICI House in 1958), the tentative embrace of modernity and internationalisation (e.g. the impact of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics) and the changing ethnicities of the inner city and suburbs. This essay maps and challenges broader understandings of Melbourne’s filmic representation in the 1950s by exploring the various ways in which the city is figured in unjustly forgotten or marginalised films like The Melbourne Wedding Belle (1953), Your House and Mine (1954) and Sunday in Melbourne (1958).
