Kangaroo (1952) was Hollywood's first movie shot in Australia, seemingly calculated to offend natives. Ads proclaimed Australia "a continent that time forgot" (surely news to its eight million inhabitants) while early script drafts featured genocidal kangaroos slaughtering entire villages. That 20th Century Fox used the movie to free frozen assets, while paying cast and crew non-union wages, enraged Australia's moribund film industry. Despite such sensitivity, Kangaroo flopped, a bad joke to the few who've seen it.Set in 19th Century Australia, Kangaroo focuses on Richard Connor (Peter Lawford), a ne'er-do-well eking out a living in Sydney. Connor falls in with John Gamble (Richard Boone), a criminal who convinces him to rob a casino. The two crooks take refuge with drunk rancher McGuire (Finlay Currie) and his fiery daughter Dell (Maureen O'Hara). McGuire mistakes Connor for his long-lost son, the outlaw making no effort to dissuade him. But Dell and a local policeman (Chips Rafferty) suspect Connor and Gamble's game, forcing Connor to confront his conscience.
Filmed on location with a then-sizeable $800,000 budget, Kangaroo nonetheless looks unimpressive. Director Lewis Milestone saturates viewers with Australian imagery, from desert landscapes to dancing aborigines to endless arrays of fauna. In the opening scene, Dell awakens to wallabies on her porch and a cockatoo perched overhead! Despite Charles G. Clarke's pretty Technicolor photography, Kangaroo often resembles a travelogue more than a movie.
The pictorial aspects scarcely distract from Kangaroo's story. Screenwriter Martin Berkeley plots a standard sagebrush melodrama, replete with cattle drives, mistaken identity, bushrangers and betrayals, topped off with shallow characters and ludicrous dialog ("Your law favors the crows!"). Kangaroo periodically flares to life in set pieces like a cattle stampede or the climactic bullwhip duel. But mostly it's hack work, only the setting distinguishing it from B grade programmers.
Maureen O'Hara is so bored she can't even maintain her Irish accent. Peter Lawford might be trying but who can say? Rarely has Hollywood produced a duller leading man. Finlay Currie sports a hammy brogue like a John Ford refugee. Richard Boone's ruthless villain at least breathes some life into the show. Real Aussies like Chips Rafferty amount to local color, not unlike the various marsupials and lizards.
Kangaroo is a forgettable curio. Those fabled mass-murdering roos would have been much more interesting than the dull, derivative Outback Western we ultimately got.
