The Man From Kangaroo was the third of Snowy Baker’s five Australian feature films, which were produced between 1918 and 1920. With Snowy’s physical prowess again to the fore, it was commercially successful in Australia, but received limited praise from the critics. The Sydney newspaper The Sun commented that Snowy “as an actor, pure and simple, has considerable headway yet to make,” a blunt but honest observation.
The broader criticism of the film particularly regarded the perceived “Americanism” of the plot. Carroll-Baker Australian Productions had imported U.S. director Wilfred Lucas, his wife the writer Bess Meredyth, cinematographer Robert V. Doerrer, and actress Brownie Vernon, to support their notion of an Australian cinema which could also reach international audiences. This carried benefits and risks. It’s important to note that the 1920s was a difficult decade for the Australian film industry, which had thrived previously, but suffered increasingly in competition with imported cinema, and Hollywood films in particular. The Royal Commission into the Moving Picture Industry (1927), instituted by the Australian government, attempted to address a wide range of film production and distribution issues, including a potential quota system. It had some impact, but the impending arrival of sound and the steady growth of the already established Hollywood machine in Australia led to a major decline in Australian production in the 1930s.
The Sun newspaper further observed, “It seems a pity that so much Americanism should be injected into films that are advertised as purely Australian. In The Man from Kangaroo, for instance, apart from the fact that the scenes have been taken on Australian soil, and that the leading man Snowy Baker is an Australian, there is nothing in it that is not steeped in Americanism.” More pointedly, it noted that “The picture is quite well played and the interest is sustained until Mr. Baker starts to ride, which he does ad nauseam, and with an unnecessary amount of violence.” Ironically, when a re-edited version of the film was released in the United States in late 1921, under the title The Better Man, one American film magazine found it to be “a picture which was far above the average of the ordinary Western. Baker will not need to take a back seat for any American star. Blessed with magnetism, possessing a million dollar smile and an adaptability for any kind of hazardous work, he is the kind of stuff from which stars – real stars – are made.”
As one of the film’s producers as well as its star, Snowy Baker himself added to the publicity hyperbole, declaring with enormous confidence to the readers of the magazine The Picture Show: “We are in the throes of producing the greatest Motion Picture that has yet been credited to Australian brains and effort… Mr. Lucas says I am a better stunt actor than anyone living. He has me leaping from crag to crag, diving hundreds of feet into roaring chasms, saving heroines – by the hundreds it seems to me… I know that the crank of the camera is relentlessly grinding on, and every punch I ‘get home’ will be recorded on the screen for you.”
Filmed in the beautiful Kangaroo Valley in New South Wales and Gunnedah in north-west NSW, the plot of The Man from Kangaroo revolves around Snowy in the role of John Harland, a probationary vicar and ex-champion middleweight boxer. John falls in love with heiress Muriel Hammond, whose guardian Martin Giles is plotting to marry her to control her fortune and prevent her from exposing his corrupt management of her affairs. John coaches local boys to box, and displays a series of spectacular dives to the local kids in the swimming pond, before being misrepresented by Giles and having to relocate to a distant country town. Misunderstandings with Muriel; saving a good man from thugs and chasing the crook over walls and jumping off bridges; meeting good people in his country town as well as evil men from the neighbouring property; his realization that he needs to step away from being a vicar to become a bushman willing to fight; horse chases on his steed Boomerang; and ultimately saving Muriel in a wild stagecoach chase, which ends with the hero and heroine leaping into a river from a high bridge – all of this action provided the Snowy Baker persona with plenty of opportunities to display decency and physical prowess.
Doerrer’s cinematography is serviceable and occasionally beautiful, and the Australian countryside and rural scenes provide plenty of spectacular space for Snowy’s exploits. Of special note are the particularly elaborate artwork titles by Syd Nicholls. Carroll-Baker Australian Productions persevered for two more very similar films in 1920, The Shadow of Lightning Ridge and The Jackeroo of Coolabong, with the same crew, before parting ways, with Snowy Baker heading to Hollywood in 1921 to build on his earlier contacts. – Meg Labrum