Meaninigful Violence

...Finally, Mrs...

...Upon the baby's birth, Mrs...

...A pail of political and racial unease has fallen over the country...

...Carrying a shotgun, Jimmie goes to plead with Newby, who is in a barn some distance from the main house...

...He hears its first cry and then instinctively bursts into a little dance, summoned up from his memory of tribal rites...

...His willfully cheerful "Okay, boss...

...I don't mean to suggest that we are led to condone Jimmie's actions...

...all right, boss" are compact signals of how cruelly his expectations have been raised and then dashed to dirt...

...Tabidgi, frightened, tugs gently at Jimmie's arm, persuading him to lower the shotgun, and Newby, regaining his composure, blusters, "Get to bed...

...He realizes the true horror is not that racists are personally monstrous (although they may well be): Their cruelty is especially ugly for its impersonality...

...Lewis' understanding of Jimmie's cultural isolation is readily apparent from this sequence...

...Jimmie initially resists, then reluctantly accepts their gift, thanking them in the most awkward manner possible: "It's good of you to go to the trouble...

...Newby's neck, we recoil in horror...

...You would think it would take quite a while to make up your mind to kill someone and then do it," one of the murderers will say later at his trial...

...As Jimmie, Tommy Lewis does not so much act as react, just as the character does...

...The young man's arguments fall on deaf ears...

...On Screen MEANINGFUL VIOLENCE BY ROBERT ASAHINA HALFWAY through The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith there is a scene of remarkable power and impressive emotional intensity: a mass murder that erupts with the crazy spontaneity of a natural disaster...

...she begins) but to the enormity of what he is about to do...

...But to the preacher's wife Jimmie's prospects are brighter than ever: Just think, she tells him, if you could only find a white girl to marry, then your grandchildren would be "scarcely black at all...

...He can no longer feed his family, and Mrs...

...In a brief scene we see Jimmie building a house for himself and his new bride...

...But it is too much when the sadistic Farrell tortures the prisoner and the next day orders Jimmie to bury his body, found hanging from the rafters of the cell...

...One sequence reveals both his strength and that of the movie...

...Jimmie is waiting outside the Newby house when the baby is born...

...The director understands that violence has consequences: moral, emotional and-It is almost embarrassing to have to add-physical...

...This is violence in the service of art, not thrills...

...It is a pathetic one-room hovel, barely big enough for a bed, and we cringe along with Gilda when Jimmie says to her, in a mixture of pride and pathos, "It's a start...

...their once nomadic tribal existence has been reduced to subsistence in squalid shanty towns, where the women are quickly turned into whores and the men into menial laborers...

...I would single out Elizabeth Alexander and Ray Barrett, who are not afraid to be truly repulsive as the patronizing Miss Graf and the sadistic Constable Farrell...

...These are violent times," observes the Reverend Neville, who has reared and educated Jimmie Blacksmith, a half-white aborigine, in an outback mission...

...I'm just an ignorant black man, but take my word for it, it just takes a second...

...Similarly, when Jimmie is on the run, he and Mort, who has come to his aid, decide to take a hostage, a schoolteacher named McCready...

...In addition, the political aspect of the story, until this point mostly unobtrusive, is confusingly highlighted...

...Steve Dodds, properly bewildered as Tabidgi, also deserves special praise...

...So are Schepisi's economical direction and writing, which are responsible for the entire film's poignancy and tragedy...

...After another farm job comes to a similar end, Jimmie signs on as a tracker for the local constable, Farrell...

...Newby and Miss Graf have encouraged Gilda to leave him...

...Later, Mort and Tabidgi bring him tribal tokens to honor the birth of the child...

...As Jimmie's axe sinks into Miss Grafs body, we feel as much as hear a sickening thud: it is as if we were watching a real murder that will leave behind a maimed body and turn our insides out as we try to fit the act into our scheme of right and wrong, justice and retribution...

...The film begins in 1900, the year of the federation of the Australian colonies...

...The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is assembled like a mosaic-from short takes packed with revealing details, much the way television spots are...

...Shortly afterward, Jimmie and Tabidgi, armed with axes, go to the main house to "scare" Mrs...

...Long before Jimmie is captured, for instance, a hangman named Hyberry appears in a scene that seems to have been inserted merely to set up a subsequent one that refers to his being made a Member of the Order of the British Empire for his services, including the scheduled hanging of Jimmie Blacksmith...

...He finds work building a fence for a farmer named Healy, thanks to a letter of reference from the Reverend Neville, yet is underpaid upon satisfactory completion of the job...

...He recognizes her for what she is, yet desires her for what she could be: the wife he has sought as a step toward acceptance in the white world...

...Eventually they marry, although she is noticeably pregnant...

...So Jimmie returns to manual labor, this time on a sheep ranch own^d by the Newby family...

...Characters are arbitrarily introduced whose significance is never quite clear...

...Other skillful touches reflect Schepi-si's advertising background (usually a handicap to serious filmmakers...

...Newby into giving them some food...

...Why would they want to slow themselves down when they have been successfully eluding their pursuers...

...It won't do to protest that the film is based on an actual story and must stick to the facts...

...You never get the feeling that Healy or Farrell or Newby or Miss Graf see anything but the color of Jimmie's skin...

...Yet if the role McCready is intended to play is clear enough, his fortuitous appearance and his coincidentally appropriate politics strain credibility...

...his participation in the murders appears to be motivated less by shared anger than by shared blood, an appropriate demonstration of a pre-modern sense of loyalty...

...then we get a glimpse of the finished interior at the same time Gilda does...

...The arrival of a white baby plus two more blacks soon begins to trouble Newby, however...

...Eager to prove his ability in a murder case, he helps Farrell interrogate his former neighbors in the shantytown, smashes a few of their heads for good measure, and winds up arresting an old acquaintance for the crime...

...He stomps his foot and then hops, all the time twisting a shoe, once the symbol of his acceptance of the white man's ways, that he has taken off...

...Torn between the dreary inevitability of the black world and the faint possibilities of the white world, Jimmie struggles to better himself...

...Supported by his half-brother, Mort, a full-blooded aborigine, and his uncle, Tabidgi, who have come to visit, he endures the humiliation...

...Still worse is Jimmie and Mort's decision to kidnap him...

...There he meets Gilda, a white girl whose sexual availability extends even to him...

...This extraordinary scene is truly a catharsis...

...There is a moment of shocked silence as both Jimmie and Newby sense the sudden shift in the balance of power...

...It is a galling end to an episode that has opened Jimmie's eyes to the power of threatening violence...

...Schepisi deftly sketches in the whites, too, without making them caricatures of evil...

...She greets them at the door with a shotgun, causing all the rage Jimmie has long suppressed to erupt wildly: He and his uncle massacre the Newby women-the mother and two young daughters-along with Miss Graf and one of the Newbys' sons...

...Unfortunately, the second half of the film is not as satisfying as the first, partly because of a significant structural problem: The natural climax of the story is the murder, not the chase that we know must follow and will result in Jimmie's capture...

...When Jim-mie plunges his axe into Mrs...

...the film is most realistic when it is dramatically true...

...Freddy Reynolds does well as the cheerful Mort, although his part, the noble savage, is not a difficult one...

...Newby and Miss Graf, a schoolteacher boarding at the ranch, unhesitatingly point out to Jimmie that the child cannot be his because it is white...

...In fact, the first half of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is one of the most impressive works of film art I have seen...

...Christ Miss, I ain't a savage," he answers in a manner that is both joyful and reproachful...

...Newby invites him in, asking "Will you behave yourself...

...The execution has something to do with the political intrigue surrounding the forthcoming vote on federation, but all this is rather muddled and unnecessary to our appreciation of Jimmie's plight...

...When Miss Graf desperately tries to stop Jimmie from butchering her, we react not only to the pathetic futility of her condescending schoolmarmish plea ("Now Mr...

...The ranch owner refuses credit to Jimmie for work already completed...

...Healy also refuses to write a reference letter, prompting Jimmie to voice a suspicion that he can't write, and the farmer adds injury to insult by knocking him flat before curtly dismissing him...

...Jimmie's tight little smile, for example, gets more and more pinched as indignity after indignity are heaped upon him...

...We are not surprised, therefore, that his frustrations have wrenched his gut and twisted his morality until violence seems his sole escape from himself, his unrealizable ambitions and the two worlds-black and white-where he does not fit in...

...McCready is a kind of sympathetic liberal...

...Nonetheless there is much art, even in the second half of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith...

...Fred Schepisi, who directed and wrote the screenplay from the novel of the same name by Thomas Keneally, has so skillfully orchestrated the tension of the first half of the movie that the mass murder comes almost as a relief, a violent purging of the explosive rage and frustration that have been building up as much in the audience as in Jimmie...

...he tries to reason with the two fugitives and even joins in their mockery of the government's thus far futile attempts to capture them...

...And for the aborigines life is worse than ever...

...Adding to its power is the understatement used to heighten the impact of the murder scene...

...instinctively he levels the gun at Newby's chest...

...The performances, by the mixture of amateurs and professionals, are nearly flawless...

...Sche-pisi pictures the massacre as a reprehensible and grisly crime...