Grandad Rudd: A country cricket match

The film was photographed by Frank Hurley, with George Heath as his assistant. The clouds behind the cricketers are typical of Hurley’s style – pictorialism, with lots of light thrown on the actors. Ken Hall was later to prefer a softer style of lighting in his films after he visited Hollywood in 1935, shortly after completing this film. Cinesound was shut down for several months to allow Hall to make the trip, during which he bought new equipment for back projection (see Thoroughbred (1936)) and studied the latest production techniques. Grandad Rudd is, in that sense, the last of the older-style Cinesound pictures, owing much of its style to the silent era. The movies he made after this generally have a greater visual sophistication and more modern conception – as well as a softer lighting style.

Grandad Rudd synopsis

The battling pioneer settler Dad Rudd (Bert Bailey) has now become a grandfather and a prosperous grazier, but no less careful with his money. His sons Dave (Fred MacDonald), Joe (William McGowan) and Dan (George Lloyd) do most of the farm work, for meagre wages, while enduring their father’s insults and tyranny. Egged on by their wives, the sons storm up to the big house, threatening to leave. Grandad Rudd initially grants them a wage increase, then raises their rent by an equal amount. When eldest grandchild Betty (Elaine Hamill) announces her intention to marry a shifty neighbour, Henry Cook (John D’Arcy), Grandad Rudd joins forces with her suitor, Tom Dalley (John Cameron) to unmask Cook as a liar and an ex-convict.

Grandad Rudd curator's notes

Grandad Rudd was made quickly in late 1935, after the box office failure of Ken Hall’s fourth feature at Cinesound, Strike Me Lucky. Hall hated making failures, so Grandad Rudd was an attempt to repeat the great box office success of On Our Selection (1932) and The Squatter’s Daughter (1933), his first two films. Grandad Rudd was indeed a reasonable financial success, although it isn’t one of Hall’s best films. There’s a lot of amiable slapstick humour, but not much of a story. Hall devotes little effort to characterisation, beyond the character of old Mr Rudd himself – played again by Bert Bailey – but this time the old curmudgeon is barely likeable. He bullies his sons and their wives, he’s a miser and a drunk and something of a professional grump. His children aren’t much better. Prodigal son Dan tells his other two brothers that he’s ‘stopping round ‘ere till ‘e pegs out, to get me share, the same as you’.

Much of the film is taken up with comical sketches that reduce the film’s emotional effectiveness. Many of these are the old-fashioned silent film-style routines that Hall had yet to leave behind, even in 1935, seven years after the coming of sound. Still, some of these sketches are beautifully put together to entertain audiences who were desperate for a good laugh, in the midst of the Depression. The drunken routine in clip one is a series of well-timed gags that owe a lot to vaudeville, but Hall makes good use of dialogue too, as the two men prattle on while trying to ride a horse. These scenes are part of a long tradition in Australian cinema of lampooning the wowsers in society – represented in the film by the temperance meeting that the Rudds are uncomfortably hosting when Grandad and his neighbour arrive home.

Notes by Paul Byrnes

Education notes

This black-and-white clip taken from the 1935 feature Grandad Rudd shows 34 runs being scored off the last ball to give the Rudd family victory in a cricket match against the Regan family. Set on a country cricket ground, the clip opens with Grandad Rudd hitting the ball into a well. As the excited crowd in the pavilion cheer and the commentator describes the action, the Regan team try frantically to retrieve the ball while Grandad runs until he can run no more. The Rudd team then use a wheelbarrow to push Grandad across the crease for the winning run.

Educational value points

• This clip shows the type of slapstick sight gags – the comic running styles, the members of the Regan team tumbling into the well, the runner’s pants falling down, Grandad in the wheelbarrow – that were popular with Australian audiences during the 1930s. This style of humour, reminiscent of exaggerated silent movie comedy, was intended to ensure Grandad Rudd was a commercial success. The first ‘Dad and Dave’ talkie, On Our Selection, had been a huge hit.

• The clip illustrates some of the defining characteristics of the ‘Dad and Dave’ variety of Australian imaginative texts – the triumph of the ‘Dad’ character (in winning the match) and the revelation that he is lot more astute than he first appears (in this case about the rules of cricket). The ‘Dad and Dave’ genre dates back to a sketch by Steele Rudd that appeared in the Bulletin on 14 December 1895 and includes stories, radio serials, stage productions and films.

• Grandad Rudd is a fairly early example of an Australian ‘talkie’ (Australia’s first successful ‘talkie’ movie, Diggers, was made in 1931) and it reveals that the director and scriptwriters had yet to completely relinquish the silent film approach to movie making. None of the dialogue is critical to the action, and even the device of the comic commentator derives from silent films where cuts to the commentator and intertitles of the call were used to explain sports action.

• The plot of the clip derives from Regan waiving the lost ball rule – according to Law 20 of the game of cricket any fielder can call ‘lost ball’ and the batting team gets as many runs as they have scored or six runs, whichever is greater. Waiving the rule advantages the team with big hitters in situations where the ball is easily lost beyond the boundary. Scores in the 30s or even in the 60s off a single ball are not unknown when the lost ball rule is not played.

• Renowned Australian cinematographer James Francis (‘Frank’) Hurley (1885–1962) was the lead cameraman for Grandad Rudd and the clip exemplifies his skill in location work. The outdoor scenes are beautifully composed, particularly the shots of the flight of the ball against the massed clouds. In the 1930s Hurley made four features with Cinesound, but after Grandad Rudd his outdoor expertise was no longer needed once Cinesound turned to back projection.

• Cricket was a very popular sport in the 1930s and social matches played between impromptu teams were common. Such matches were often played on a single-innings, limited-over basis with the rules agreed beforehand by the two teams. Many Australian men of the time, like the players in the clip, owned elements of cricket equipment and dress including caps and white flannel trousers that they used for social matches.

Education notes provided by The Learning Federation and Education Services Australia