'Robbery under arms' (1957) an English western film shot in the classic Australian Flinders Ranges setting
The Rank Organisation's Robbery Under Arms was filmed, as English western, in South Australia in 1957.
Image courtesy Moviemem
Robbery Under Arms, with South Australia’s Flinders Ranges as one of its shooting locations in 1957, arose from British film makers push to make English westerns to compete with Hollywood.
The result with the 1957 Robbery Under Arms is what had been called “a very odd beast indeed: a film based on an Australian classic, which combines Australian scenery, American genre conventions and English moral values” .
Rolf Boldrewood’s bushranging novel Robbery Under Arms had already been adapted for stage and screen, going back to stage first performed in 1890, followed in 1907 by one of the earliest Australian feature films.
The story follows two brothers and their association with the notorious bushranger, Captain Starlight, a renegade form a noble English family. Set in the 1850s goldfields, Starlight’s gang steals cattle and robs under arms.
Jack Lee directed the sound and technicolour film version of the novel for the English Rank Organisation. It was very much westernised despite the classic Australian scenery such as the Flinders Ranges.
Starring Peter Finch as Captain Starlight, with Ronald Lewis, Maureen Swanson and David McCallum, the 1957 English film took the very radical step of killing off Dick Marston, the novel’s narrator, to turn the Australian hero into a more English one, and also remakes Starlight, the English aristocrat of the novel, over into an American lone gun.
The attempted lynching in the film is something seen in numerous American Westerns but not part of Australian history and not to be found in Boldrewood’s novel. But beneath this superficial Americanisation of the film, is an essential Englishness, also not part of the Robbery Under Arms novel. The 1957 film does not portray the Australian cynicism towards authority and, in one of the crucial scenes that has no equivalent in the novel, brothers Jim and Dick determine to try to mend their ways by becoming gold diggers instead of bushrangers.
