Simply Perfect

Good concept, poorly executed.

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Maureen O'Hara, in her prime, is wasted in this rather dreary , pointless, outback yarn, shot in Technicolor, on location in Australia. Fortunately, she would rebound with 2 of her best roles, in "The Quiet Man" and "Against All Flags", where she had more interesting leading men(John Wayne, Errol Flynn) than the badly miscast urbane Peter Lawford, barely recognizable behind all that facial hair.In a minimal effort to justify the title, we do see a couple of roos hopping about in one scene. But, at times, we see many more thirsty, hungry , cattle, who only have wind-blown dust to eat much of the time. The plot is an unfocused mishmash, that never really grabs our attention and never comes to any dramatic conclusion, aside from a big rainstorm that finally ends the long drought, that has the townies doing 'a rain dance'. Shortly before this, Lawford and Boone engage in a bizarre fight with bullwhips and a rifle, after being spotted in the bush by a couple of lawmen. ......Maureen, after begging to be included, wanted out after discovering what it was really going to be like. Perhaps the only saving grace for contemporary audiences was the brief shots of some of the native animals and natives, at a time when such weren't commonly available.

Kangaroo which is the title of this first Hollywood production shot in Australia has this title if for no other reason than to give the movie-going public an identifiable Aussie image. It could have been entitled duck billed platypus and I wish they'd featured one or two of those in the film. As it was there weren't all that many kangaroos to see.Maureen O'Hara actually fought to get into this film according to her memoirs and then regretted it. She liked the original script as a straightforward Aussie western and looked forward to the trip. Darryl Zanuck was going to cast his current mistress in the part, but Maureen talked him into using her.However once she got to Australia the story was changed to include an incest angle that she found abhorrent. Part of the plot involved a pair of confidence men and robbers played by Peter Lawford and Richard Boone to lead Maureen's father Finlay Currie into believing Lawford is his long lost son. It wasn't real necessary to the story in my opinion either. The fact that this was a first Hollywood production there and that any disharmony might have caused an international incident between the USA and Australia kept her from walking off the set. Not that there weren't problems with her co-stars, both Lawford and Boone she says treated her badly, especially after they were caught in a nasty scandal there that never saw the light of day until her memoirs. On the other hand the scenes on the Australian outback are nicely done and when all is said and done, the film is just an average western set in the land down under. The next Hollywood production shot there was The Sundowners and while star Robert Mitchum had his problems with the Aussie press also, The Sundowners is a light years better film than Kangaroo.

"Kangaroo" is a decent film once you get past the lame title. There's hardly a kangaroo to be seen in the movie, but it seems the producers of this big-budget film shot on location in Australia wanted something to say "exotic" right away, and why take a chance misspelling "koala bear"?Not otherwise much different from the types of films they called Westerns and made by the score in Hollywood in the 1950s, "Kangaroo" features Peter Lawford and Richard Boone playing a pair of outlaws, on the run after killing a no-good gambling-hall owner. They find themselves able to make their escape by pretending to have bought a herd of cattle from an old rancher with a drinking problem (Finlay Currie). And if the rancher happens to think one of them is his long-lost son, what's the harm in indulging him for some extra security?Having low expectations of both Boone and especially Lawford going in, I was pleasantly surprised at how well the two anchored the proceedings as gritty, amoral partners of circumstance. Boone has a fun time playing a devil-may-care type with a deep vocabulary who makes his philosophy clear early on: "I never feel any regrets. I died years ago...To live, one must first die."The two even manage to launder their bloody booty by giving it to the rancher and pretending its their payment to him in exchange for cattle. What if the cattle die, from a long-standing drought now gripping the whole region? Well, it's better than a noose for this pair, and as a game of chance, it's no worse a bet than any other either man has taken on in recent months.Lawford's Richard Connor is the conscience of the pair, a solid backboard for the proceedings as Boone gnashes on the hammy script for all its worth. He has a hard time reconciling himself to pretending to be the rancher's long-lost son, especially after he gets a load of the rancher's other sibling Dell (Maureen O'Hara).O'Hara is only okay here, a far cry from the light of so many John Ford movies shot around the same time. Director Lewis Milestone is himself no slouch, he shot "All Quiet On The Western Front" and gets value both from the location shoots and isolated moments like when a few raindrops plink down on dusty ground."Kangaroo" offers a ripping set-up, and in sequences like a long cattle drive where parched cows attract crows while the cattle drivers wait in vain for rain, you feel the desperation of the story and its main characters right in your guts. Perhaps I was the victim of a poorly-edited cut, but my 85-minute version of the movie feels otherwise gruesomely truncated, especially when a sudden whipfight breaks out in the last five minutes and is resolved by an off-camera gunshot. Not a way to end a movie!Still, there's more to like than not to like here, even if the plot feels at times lamely stretched to take in such vintage Australian elements as aborigines and boomerangs. Everyone wears a Crocodile Dundee hat, too. Yet there's a charm to all this, too, in Hollywood's first movie shot in Australia playing like a Randolph Scott western with a bigger budget and more ambitious cinematography.The biggest problem is the truncated sense of time; one can imagine the film going a little longer in certain directions, fleshing out story lines that seem to wither here. Maybe it did, and I was only the victim of a cheap DVD transfer. I liked "Kangaroo" enough to enjoy the better parts and not sweat the weaker stuff so much. Not great, as I said, but decent entertainment.

You look at this cast, Peter Lawford, Maureen O'Hara, Chips Rafferty, Richard Boone and Finlay Currie, and you'd think this would be a winner. Well, not quite. The story line which draws on the fortunes of an Irish immigrant (Currie) and his daughter (O'Hara)to rural Australia just kind of wears out. Boone, of course, is at his hammy best as the bad guy and Lawford, in his pre-Ratpack days, provides the romantic interest but the story just seems to run out of steam, even with the efforts of veteran Aussie character actor, Chips Rafferty. If it shows up one night on the late show, you might want to watch it but I doubt if you'll remember much of it afterwards.