Based on a true incident, the story concerns a light-skinned half-caste whose sunny countenance is gradually clouded over by contact with white society in turn-of-the-century Australia. "Do you have any religion other than nigger?" -- this asked by a rustic during a brief recess from chopping off the heads of chickens -- is the sort of thing Jimmie must put up with in every alternate scene, together with the perfunctory "black bastard" and "sodding darkie'" and so forth. Enough insults and abuses of this type and worse are allowed to pile up that it seems a rather long time before Jimmie and an accomplice hack up four white women and a male child, and in the process smash several symbolic eggs, cups, and saucers. The sudden reversal of sympathy that occurs at this juncture is a subtler dramatic effect than anything found anywhere around it. And because of the aboriginal's superior wiliness in the bush country, it seems another rather longish time (and several more slaughtered whites) before Jimmie is finally run down, shot in the cheek, pummeled with rifle butts, and sentenced to be hanged. A plethora of milky visual effects -- the Vermeerishly lighted interiors and the spacially vague landscapes that trail off into gray mist -- give the appearance of some stylishness. But the storytelling betrays a primitiveness that all too readily gets construed as, and excused as, clumsy sincerity or dogged fidelity to fact. With Tommy Lewis; directed by Fred Schepisi. (1978) — Duncan Shepherd
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