100 Years of The Sentimental Bloke

What are your thoughts about the adaptation of the verse novel into the two film versions?

Lottie Lyell and Arthur Tauchert in The Sentimental Bloke (1919)

Longford’s 1919 version of The Sentimental Bloke is rightly regarded as Australia’s contribution to the classics of silent cinema. It’s a very good retelling of Dennis’s original. Although Longford remains pretty faithful to Dennis’s book, he is actually able to improve on it in some ways. For example, he is able to make Doreen a stronger figure, by showing her decisive gestures and facial expressions. It’s interesting, too, to see Longford making some visual jokes in keeping with the mood of Dennis’s work. For instance, there’s a moment when the Bloke stares into a cut pumpkin and the audience is made aware of his thoughts when a shot of his beloved’s face is superimposed onto the pulpy flesh and seeds. It’s a nice example of 1919 special effects, as well as of Longford’s sense of humour.

The 1932 talkie, directed by Frank Thring, bears all the hallmarks of the film industry’s difficult transition to sound. In the NSFA’s collection there are production stills from both the 1919 version and the 1932 version. The cinematographer in each case is Arthur Higgins. He has lost a bit of hair, but the real difference in the photos is that the camera is so much more bulky for the talkie. That was necessary to damp the whirring sound of the shutter. In addition to the heavy photographic equipment, the limitations of the early recording equipment meant that the actors’ movements were constricted and they had to project their voices as if playing to a theatre audience. It may be that those technical limitations were the reason that Dennis and Thring chose to adapt the play version of The Sentimental Bloke from the early 1920s rather than directly working with Dennis’s original book. All in all, it’s a pretty clunky piece of film — interesting as one of Australia’s first big sound films, but, as Ken Hall said, ‘a pale shadow’ of Longford’s version.

Is there a place for a new film version of the Bloke?

That’s a hard question. The fundamental issue in Dennis’s book is still relevant — the transition from an irresponsible, risk-taking, free young man into a good husband and father. But the larrikin slang of Dennis’s Bloke is too hard for most people to follow today. It’s also true that tough blokes are out of favour with a sizable section of contemporary Australian culture. And Dennis’s exaggerated version of Australian identity doesn’t have as much appeal as it once did for those who want to see Australia as multicultural or cosmopolitan or sophisticated.

The collection holds a script for another The Sentimental Bloke, written by Bob Ellis and Maurice Murphy in 1982, from a then contemporary left-wing perspective. It never went into production, though there could be a lot of different reasons for that. I guess it would be possible to come up with a new film version of the Bloke, but there would have to be quite a lot of changes for it to work for a broad audience today.

An Unsentimental Bloke: The Life and Work of CJ Dennis is available from Wakefield Press.