The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978)

 

Jimmie Blacksmith

The seventies seem to have been the heyday of Australian cinema. The list editors certainly were inclined to include a lot of movies from down under. I am not really surprised, they usually distinguish themselves with their high quality and production value. For anybody interested in Australian cinema in general I can recommend the ACMI in Melbourne, which I reviewed some years ago.

“The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith” is the latest Ausie movie on the List (for me) and my the first 1978 movie. It is a movie of exceptionally high production value that takes on one of the harder subjects around, racism.

We follow a young fellow called Jimmie Blacksmith (Tom E. Lewis). He is half Aboriginal, half white and has been taken in by a missionary family to “take the black out of him”. This is around the year 1900, Australia is all about the Federation plans, but the real issue here is racism. The Aboriginals are at this time herded together in shantytowns and ragged camps with rampant alcoholism and prostitution. Jimmie is torn between his Aborignal family and culture and the European culture he is being schooled in. When it is time to leave the missionary home, he aims to make a life for himself as an upright citizen.

This is a very difficult target. Jimmie finds it hard to find work, and the employers he eventually finds, abuse and cheat him on the simple basis that he is a “Black”. The racism is truly rampant, and it is everywhere the same.

Eventually it is too much for Jimmie. His current employers, the Newby’s, refuse to pay him what he is owed (a small fortune) on the basis of him hosting some of his (black) family and they want his (white) wife, Gilda (Angela Punch McGregor) to leave Jimmie to find employment elsewhere. Something clicks in the head of Jimmie and he attacks and kills the women of the Newby household and then goes on a rampage among those people who have abused him.

The movie is based on a novel, which in turn is based on a real character. How much of the original events eventually made it into the movie I have no way of telling, but it is obvious that this is a (traditional) story about an outlaw in the vein of Billy the Kid and Ned Kelly, with the angle of explaining the villainy with rampant racism. In this way racism is the source of the problem and the murders simply the inevitable result of it. This angle of making a notorious criminal a justified freedom fighter was typical of the seventies revisionist stream and may feel a bit ham-fisted today.

I read the main story here as about the rampant racism, the systemic, the mental and the direct racism aimed at Aboriginal people and culture, and this is the earliest movie I have watched that goes this far. We even have a schoolteacher who puts it into words, listing all the evils done to the Aboriginal people and culture by Europeans, including killing 270.000 of them. A staggering number!

I do applaud the topic and the wish to bring it to attention and I have no doubt that the scenes of racism seen here are true enough. My objection to the movie is a mere general one, something that has little to do with this topic. We get to see a lot of Jimmie Blacksmith and from what we learn he is smart, he has pride and he is resourceful and he is not that prone to rash and emotional actions. Then how is he suddenly turned into a blood thirsty maniac, killing women and children at large? I fully understand he is being provoked and I also understand that it is building up over a long time, but it is both very sudden and very extreme and does not fit his character at all. I would have expected something smarter, something more just and effective, not this.

The explanation is unfortunately right in front of us. There is a real story about a half-blood mass murderer and racism is then appropriated to explain the murderer. Sort of a backward argumentation, turning an outright criminal into a justified revenging angel.

Sadly, I am struggling buying this angle. It is too forced, and that is a shame because the topic is too important to be trivialized.

Despite being one of the biggest productions at the time, the movie did remarkably poorly in Australia. I guess the Aussies at the time were not ready for this view on their past yet.

I give it a mixed recommendation but thumbs up from here on highlighting the source problem.

 

On an entirely different note, I watched “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” last night on a plane and I strongly recommend it. That is by far funniest movie I have watched in many years. Maybe I should review it…