The Legend of Ben Hall

Seen at the Gala Cinema in Warrawong, NSW

Bea says: I really enjoyed this tale about legendary bushranger Ben Hall, who I vaguely remember hearing about at school, as the "gentleman bushranger" and who was famously shot in the back by the troopers (Boo! Hiss!).  I have to admit that the film certainly took a romanticised view of bushrangering - although there were moments that gave the necessary jolt as to the potential violence they could use; the trooper who was shot outside the pub and a father of 8 children; the scene where Ben Hall torches the draper's shop.  I am sure it was terrifying to be waylaid by a bushranger on route between Sydney, Goulburn, the goldfields and Melbourne.

But I enjoyed the story's attempts to get inside the head of Ben Hall a bit - interestingly, it struck me that Ben's separation from his wife and resulting custody battle seemed strangely modern.  I also enjoyed the depictions of 1860s life in Australia, the beautiful scenery and the knitwear - I was thrilled to see the knitters credited for it at the end!

My main critique would be that the film is a bit derivative of the old Westerns in style - I thought of John Ford and Cecil did whisper Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to me at one point,,  I would like to see Australia finding its feet with a more individual style of cinema perhaps; thinking about The Man from Snowy River and Breaker Morant; were they as derivative as this film? (I would need to watch them again to know).

Jack Martin was also rather a dish!  A great bit of escapism.
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Cecil says: I have mixed feelings about The Legend of Ben Hall. It's beautifully filmed in rural Australia and takes place in parts of New South Wales and Victoria that we know fairly well. But I felt it slightly overdid the romanticisation of a man who basically was a thief and a bit of a thug, no matter that he was the 'gentleman' bush ranger.

I did like the opening scene of the film, where they showed an original 19th century photograph of the man himself, with firm set jaw and unsmiling face, and then let the photo fade and the actual face of actor Jack Martin appear superimposed. The actor looks amazingly similar to the character.

I think we are supposed to empathise with the bush ranger who never killed anyone, who was shot in the back by trappers (uniformed police or soldiers of the time) and who was probably a cut above most of his contemporaries in intelligence. The thing is, call me conventional, but I actually didn't sympathise, and at each moment in the film when he almost gets caught, I found myself wanting them to get him to put an end to the misery he was causing lots of ordinary citizens of the time.

He may well have been idolised and fantasised about by lots of young women at the time, especially those in loveless marriages or with small town boredom as the only future visible for them, but again I'm afraid these characters just reminded me of the teenage girl hangers-on to school gangs in my own days; the kind of girls who egged their boys on to even nastier deeds against whoever their latest victim might be.

And my other problem with the film is that nobody's justification for whatever action they took came across as virtuous or seeking of justice, apart possibly for the hapless leader of the group who did finally track Hall down and stop him (hapless because none of his troops actually listened to his orders at the end).

So this certainly isn't a feel-good movie and I felt even more put out as my emotional pull seemed to run counter to the way I think the director was trying to push me. It's kind of how I feel when I watch Ken Loach films (and why I hesitate to go and see his latest by the way).

And yes, it did feel like Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid. I know in that film we all felt warmth and love for the Paul Newman and Robert Redford characters, but they were probably as vicious as Ban Hall and his cronies at around the same period...

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