Fluentiama Perfect cast and a good story

Sharkflei Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Phillipa Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

JohnHowardReid Copyright 1956 by Charles Chauvel Productions. U.S. release through Distributors Corporation of America: 12 June 1956. New York opening at the 46th Street Embassy: 27 February 1957. U.K. release through Independent/British Lion: 13 August 1956. Australian release through Columbia: 5 May 1955. Sydney opening at the Lyceum: 5 May 1955. 9,046 feet. 100 minutes. Cut to 88 minutes in the U.S.A, 73 minutes in the U.K. U.S. release title: Jedda the Uncivilized. NOTES: Charles Chauvel's final feature. After completing Jedda, he shot 13 eps for the television series Australian Walkabout. He died in 1959. "Jedda" was Number 24 at Australian ticket windows for 1955.COMMENT: Surprising to notice Jedda had a "General Exhibition" certificate on original release. It certainly wouldn't get such an all clear today. Obviously filmed without the co-operation of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the film graphically shows animals being shot and killed. Not as emotionally disturbing, but still irritating are crude technical elements such as obvious post-synching (including a ridiculously phony voice for the narrator) and a disappointingly Mickey Mouse music score from Australia's famed Isador Goodman. Director Charles Chauvel manages to get some breathtaking scenery in front of the camera, but his skills with the players are much less impressive. Tudawali comes across best. Betty Suttor and George Simpson-Lyttle are especially bad, leaving the viewer to wonder how such abominably hammy performances could have survived a screening of the initial rushes in the cutting-room. The story is so drawn out that the chase is uninvolving. It's the location photography that really impresses, the great red canyons of the Northern Territory that Kayser has so finely captured in a color system that obviously favors reds by day and purples by night. Eric Porter is credited for "additional photography", though actually his contribution is mainly limited to the animation of the jedda birds before "The End" title - and very obvious animation it is too!

johnlmodra Found this cinematic delight hard to watch for long because i felt the couples relationships too much of an artificial construct; lacking the sort of hard one unity that would make them adopt the child and the compromised lifestyle their child would inevitably face. The stiff painted portrait and dialogue is one of inevitable failure instead of the inevitable challenge all aboriginals and remote desert cattle growers and their families face. Dad being anything but helpful and far too theoretical and impractical to be credible as a partner friend and confidant . Instead of an ongoing tension that would characterize her growing up there is the overwhelming sense from the start that this fictional and overly unwise woman will lose the child .Doomed by a decision to cast the white woman carer as stupid- i don't find it a convincing story even though the intercultural tensions are and always would be tough .An opportunity lost?

mandy-1 In 1955 when I was 14 years old, my mother and I emigrated to Australia. I went to 8th grade just outside Sydney -- Cremorne Girls High School. The opening of "Jedda" the first Australian color feature film was a very big deal there. In fact the opening of any film was a pretty big deal there, entailing reservations and dressing up.In "Jedda," the title character, an aboriginal girl is brought up by a white family that adopts her. As a young woman, she is mysteriously drawn to go "Walkabout" as people of her tribe have for hundreds of years.It must have been a good year for films. "Rock Around the Clock" heralded the dawn of rock 'n roll and "Black Board Jungle" launched the career of Sidney Poitier in a tale of urban classroom violence. "Rebel Without a Cause" came out in 1955 too. I can't remember what films I saw in any particular year before or since more vividly than these. Among those classics, the now unknown "Jedda" stands out with lasting images of a beautiful aboriginal woman, stunning countryside and the residue of an emotional wallop that keeps me thinking and wishing I could see it again over 45 years later.

bamptonj An aboriginal cook from a Northern Territory cattle station dies giving birth. The child is subsequently adopted by the proprietors - the McManns' - who have just lost their own daughter. The child is named 'Jedda', meaning 'little wild goose' and she is raised (as best Sarah can, yet against the pleaful wishes of her husband and coworkers) as a white girl ("bringing her closer to our way of life"), not knowing her own language or culture. Having learnt the piano, her A.B.C. and generally being taught how to behave a proper Australian woman, the polite girl soon comes to be greatly adored by all on the ranch. Yet come rainy season, when all her aboriginal friends 'head bush', Jedda regrets not being able to go with them.Temporarily becoming a station-hand at the McManns' Station is Marbuck - a nomadic, fringe-dwelling Aborigine - whom Jedda is strangely drawn to. His tribe still observes the traditional customs of the Dreamtime as they were at the time of White Settlement. To Jedda, Marbuck is a true and absolute representation of the culture that has, because of her upbringing, always been denied and outrightly repressed (both by her 'parents' and subconsciously, herself). However, when she is unexpectedly abducted by him, she is somewhat abhorred by the experience. When Marbuck brings his new bride before his tribal elders, he is non-too-politely asked to leave his 'white' wife. The two head off into the bush; Jedda uncertain what her fate will be and Marbuck undecided what action he will take.While the topical issue of the Stolen Generation may come to mind, this film is, I believe, in no way a comprehensive piece of propaganda in favor of such a process; in fact the message the film seems to give is a mixed one. At the start of the movie, Sarah's husband recognizes and extols the pride the local Aborigines have in their culture and respects them for retaining their ancestral links (though perhaps for material reasons) - "they go out on their walkabout and come back better stock-men for it." He pleads to Sarah not to try "turning that wild, little magpie into a tame canary. Her roots are deep, they don't tame, only on the outside...it takes a thousand years to 'tame' it, you're trying in one life". Sarah, however, insists in almost a missionary tone that adopting Jedda is the only action they can take if they are to bring "them" closer to the 'Australian' way of life: "that's the old cry isn't it...you think they like to sleep with their dogs and their flies?"Made in 1955, of course, it does not try to counteract the attitude at the time that most Aborigines were fringe-dwellers and subservient to White Australia, though the film does not go out of its way to illustrate it either. Nevertheless, all the aborigines we see either exist as hired-hands especially dependent on the station's hospitality or can be categorized under the "gone bush", tribal stereotype that most Australians at the time subscribed to. Perhaps to cater for this expectation of a 1950's audience, the film makers have chosen to select unusually black Aboriginal actors. Even if not done on purpose, the cast of extras, filmed under garish-pastel Technicolor, look almost like they have been covered in Vaseline. If not for the desert scenes, an international audience may have thought they were seeing the clichéd charcoal Islanders of early Hollywood cannibal films, rather than the browner ingenious inhabitants we know today. They all address whites as "boss" and "missus".This film is greatly entertaining and heartbreaking, epic in its scope and is genuinely well-made, though the local utilization of the color format (the first film in Australia to do so) may make you chuckle. There are some very tense moments in the film as well as some beautifully shot scenes of the outback, and this movie was totally made on location. JEDDA is, we are told, a true story.