The Night, the Prowler
Australia doesn’t have many Nobel literature prize winners , and even fewer of these writer has written a screenplay. Test question of the week for your trivia quiz is name the writer and the show he wrote …
Yes folks, Patrick White has a screenplay credit, The Night, The Prowler, directed by Jim Sharman, way back in 1978.
These days you might find the DVD in the Australian section, usually somewhere down the back near the adult cinema section, or in the exotic section dedicated to arthouse and documentary fetishism.
Being cool, or wanting to do well in cinema trivia quizzes makes The Night, the Prowler an important show. After all Patrick White still carries some cachet, and Jim Sharman is well known for directing Hair at the Metro, and for directing the Rocky Horror Picture Show and making diddly squat from the subsequent endless midnight screening sessions. Sharman is also a more than respectable mainstream theatre director, a former director of the Adelaide Festival, and so on. The Prowler (comes from a time when White was doing plays like Signal Driver with Sharman, and it carries something of the same bleak, anarchist aspirations about relationships (White also wrote a stage version).
Unfortunately the result is a mess, but an interesting one. Put up against other period Australian shows like The Picturer Show Man or The Irishman or a dozen others, it’s positively riveting, though the misfires are as compelling as the few convincing moments.
The show was deemed significant enough to have formed part of the Screensound Kodak Atlab restoration program, but it’s only been given a half way decent job, and there are some night scenes, color shifts and low light interiors that still look ratty (the show looks like it was shot on 16 mm and comes in 4:3 format).
Apart from the technical burdens of age, there are clear signs that White knew nothing about cinema, and cared to learn less, preferring to evoke the curious by ways of life for the well to do in the Centennial Park area of Sydney ( a curiously arcane shelter for double story mansions and for Patrick White and his partner for many years).
Kerry Walker stars as a traumatised child of middle class parents, who claims to have been raped by a prowler (the cad also smoked a cigar and drank the best spirits in the house). Ruth Cracknell is suitably traumatised, as a mother with hair sprayed to perfection, spending long hours on the period phones with an inaudible and invisible Madge-like figure. Cracknell presides over a house gently rusting into emotionally decay, with John Frawley roaming around as the impotent husband, incapable of tending Walker or controlling Cracknell..
Walker goes a little mad, disposing of her proposed fiancée (an early John Derum of Aunty Jack sighting), and takes to being a prowler herself, culminating with her tearing up a neighbour’s house and smearing raspberry jam on a portrait, as well as slashing it with a knife. Dressed up in leather, she disturbs musicians having a nice time in Centennial Park, and eventually finds herself dealing with a naked old itinerant on his death bed. Naturally the itinerant dispenses a liberal dose of White’s philosophy before carking it.
The result has a certain period charm and fascination. Walker is better on stage than screen, but she has (as mother Cracknell observes) a certain lumpy charm, while Cracknell and the period phone into which she pours her grief to the anonymous friend, does a fussy, over the top performance which is now preserved in digital aspic. The tone ranges from the theatrical to the hysterical.
Sharrman directs as if he believes that the cinema equals camera movements and jagged cutting, as opposed to scene building and dramatic tension and flow. Some of the thoughts (such as a crane shot over a nearby apartment full of working class types) verge on the inexplicable, while the staging of other scenes (such as Walker sauntering in the park at night) verge on the clunky.
Sharrman is much more at home in the theatre, where his influence has been exceptional; in the cinema, apart from the Rocky Horror show, he’s been inexplicably inept. Much of the Prowler comes across as a student exercise of the kind you might expect from an AFTRS type hoping still to Épater le Bourgeois’ while feasting on the government teat.
It is however a rare gem as a party stopper. Yes I was watching Patrick White’s only screenplay the other night. Curious, exotic, so very White-ean, such an elegant rag. And so on. In short, four stars for poseurs, three stars for Australian cinema nostalgia freaks and name spotters, and one and a half for actual realisation. You plunks down your rental fee and you takes your chances …
Nevil Shute Norway wrote novel "On The Beach" and screen play for movie "on the Beach" starring Gregory Peck.
Believe Arthur W. Upfield has one or more of his "Bony" novels underway for screenplay and moviess
Michael K.B. Warner, January 26, 2006 12:52
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