Books, Arts & Manners: Jimmie Blacksmith (Part II)

What makes The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith so extraordinary (to resume where we left off last time) is the straightforward way in which it achieves its enormous poignancy. Even the reptiles, birds, and insects we glimpse at intervals do more than provide the obligatory nature refrain in wilderness movies. With the exception of a shot of fledglings fed by a parent bird, followed rather too obviously by a shot of a kindly schoolmaster waving goodbye to his pupils, the giant lizards, snakes, and the rest have a way of looking anxious rather than picturesque, as innocent and threatened as the aborigines. But they are also beautiful even if ghostly, like those white birds behind the final titles that drift aimlessly above an emerald landscape.

There are flaws in this wonderful film. I have already mentioned the difficulty of understanding some of the talk, black or white. The scenes in the native shantytowns are especially hard to follow, partly because of the opaque speech and partly because of the elliptical cutting. And occasionally the film does get a trifle tendentious, as in the scene in which Jimmie, Mort, and their hostage, the schoolteacher McCreadie, seek out a native initiation ground. That the sacred spot should be defaced by garbage and graffiti I can believe, but that there should be obscenities writ large by turn-of-the-century Australians all over it seems to me exaggerated, straining. And our not learning what happens to Jimmie’s innocent wife after she is pronounced guilty by the court may constitute an unnecessary lacuna.

JS

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John Simon

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What makes The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith so extraordinary (to resume where we left off last time) is the straightforward way in which it achieves its enormous poignancy. Even the reptiles, birds, and insects we glimpse at intervals do more than provide the obligatory nature refrain in wilderness movies. With the exception of a shot of fledglings fed by a parent bird, followed rather too obviously by a shot of a kindly schoolmaster waving goodbye to his pupils, the giant lizards, snakes, and the rest have a way of looking anxious rather than picturesque, as innocent and threatened as the aborigines. But they are also beautiful even if ghostly, like those white birds behind the final titles that drift aimlessly above an emerald landscape.

There are flaws in this wonderful film. I have already mentioned the difficulty of understanding some of the talk, black or white. The scenes in the native shantytowns are especially hard to follow, partly because of the opaque speech and partly because of the elliptical cutting. And occasionally the film does get a trifle tendentious, as in the scene in which Jimmie, Mort, and their hostage, the schoolteacher McCreadie, seek out a native initiation ground. That the sacred spot should be defaced by garbage and graffiti I can believe, but that there should be obscenities writ large by turn-of-the-century Australians all over it seems to me exaggerated, straining. And our not learning what happens to Jimmie’s innocent wife after she is pronounced guilty by the court may constitute an unnecessary lacuna.