Word: morant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...City University of New York: "What has happened to the American mind these days? You have only to look at the marquees featuring one horror film after another, one more domestic drama, to wonder why a European film like The Last Métro, an Australian film like Breaker Morant, is so rare among us. There is not a single stage production on Broadway just now that bears in the slightest on our public condition. The favorite subjects on the book market are terrorism, how to slim down, and how to make a fortune in real estate...
...Breaker Morant persuasively posits a parallel between this century's first large-scale colonial conflict (the Boer War) and its most recent (Viet Nam). It derives from that analogy an immediacy that one does not often find in films set in the dimming past. But there is a larger success: this very traditional-looking film is dramatically taut, full of strongly developed characters who never deteriorate into good-guy, bad-guy spokesmanship. There is no doubt that the soldiers committed the crimes with which they are charged. But their defense attorney (well played by Jack Thompson) argues that...
...BREAKER MORANT...
...heart, Breaker Morant is a courtroom drama: its basis is a play that was, in turn, based on a historical incident. There are well-staged flashbacks that grant the film a life and movement outside its judicial chamber. But there is plenty inside too, thanks in particular to Edward Woodward's fine, full-throated performance in the title role. Breaker is a hard man with a broad romantic streak...
...Australia has discovered film, it has rediscovered its own past. Some of the finest Australian films (Picnic at Hanging Rock, My Brilliant Career, Breaker Morant) are set on the cusp of the 20th century, when the country was approaching federation and its citizens were struggling for an identity apart from that of decorous Mother England. This was a country in adolescent turbulence. No wonder, then, that so many Australian novels (and now films) are tales of young nonconformists seeking liberation through maturity or anarchy. In The Getting of Wisdom, a bright upstart triumphs over the snobbery of her classmates...