Carry Me Back

We know that one picture is worth a thousand words and we also know (from backache) that 'every picture tells a story'. That is not proof, however, that pictures by themselves make a film. Carry Me Back demonstrates yet again that, in their visual impact, New Zealand films are second to none. But time and again, while they have excelled in pictorial composition and dramatic lighting, they have been sadly deficient in crisp editing, deft exposition and a sharply defined narrative technique.

If those faults were apparent to some degree (as I believe they were) in Skin Deep, Beyond Reasonable Doubt and The Scarecrow they are even more obvious in Carry Me Back. Possibly it is due to a general lack of subtlety in the whole enterprise. The means may be sophisticated but the content and the point of view are not so very far distant from the Snake Gully of radio's heyday. Australia filmed the Steele Rudd stories some 40 or 50 years ago, in an appropriately broad comic style. In those days they still had vestiges of the almost elbow-jolting humorous delivery we both seem to have inherited from touring American vaudeville shows. Anything funny must be played to the hilt in case anyone misses the point. The style survives here, as TV's recent Loose End series showed; and in the theatre too it is possible to see comedy sign posted and semaphored to let the audience know when to laugh.

That is not to say Carry Me Back is over acted by some of its principal players. It is more a kind of commendably well intentioned and strenuous effort to sustain a plot line so tenuous it is totally exhausted well before the end. Curiously, its slightness does not prevent it from being hard to follow at times. The odd behaviour of Aunty Bird is not clearly motivated by her relationship with the escaped prisoner Mac; and yet great pains are taken (at some cost to our patience and the film's pace) to background the wartime connection between Mac and 'TK', the elderly farmer whose death is the mainspring of the story. That, in turn, makes the introduction of a second body-carrying wardrobe puzzling rather than hilarious, because it is done quite arbitrarily and without the build-up such a gag requires.

The shortcomings of script and direction were exemplified, for me, in a moment at the graveside during the old man's burial when the girl produced his false teeth, discovered (too much as a plot contrivance and too little as an accident) in the empty wardrobe. This had the makings of a truly splendid shock effect and a huge belly laugh. How effective it would have been if, when everyone else was tossing momentoes down on to the coffin, she had casually but with a wealth of meaning dropped the teeth as her contribution. But the opportunity was missed - although, needless to say, the sequence itself was carefully setup and beautifully photographed. And there you have it: technical proficiency, practical shortsightedness.

Carry Me Back is always lovely to look at, sometimes very funny and occasionally awkwardly melodramatic. Above all, it is shot through (if I may use that expression) with local colour. The horseplay and the mateship of the country boys going to town for a Ranfurly Shield match are absolutely dinkum. Where the direction falters and the style becomes uneasy is in the treatment of the two main characters, Arthur and Jimmy. They are the sons of a tough, obstinate and (so we are told) cantankerous old rooster who elects to die - inconveniently - in a Wellington motel bed, having expressed a wish to be buried on his Marlborough farm.

Getting him back home is the boys' problem; and to do so they employ not only several unorthodox or illegal methods, but also a variety of emotional responses. This can be disconcerting. Late in the film Arthur addresses a deeply felt reproach to his father's trussed-up corpse - having just made an outrageously farcical attempt to stuff the body into the boot of his car. If Arthur's distress was justified (and it was a movingly genuine cry from the heart) it came too late to have any real meaning; and if it was to be credible we should have been shown some evidence of TK's brutal insensitivity, not told about it so late in the day. All we have seen of TK before his unfortunate demise has suggested nothing more than a tiresomely cranky old coot - not a Murdstone or a Moulton Barrett.

I liked Carry Me Back very much for its camerawork - especially for one breathtaking shot of a plane banking over a millpond calm Wellington Harbour on which a Picton ferry was departing. Not only was the shot exceptional for what it was, it was also germane to the development of the plot. That was a bonus. At other times the photography was admirable but left in to no great purpose. Did we have to spend quite so much time tossing about in Cook Strait with that boring old Tony Quinn of a Greek fisherman? Did the journey from Picton back to the home farm have to be quite so long drawn out? Incidents and sequences were stretched beyond endurance. Trite though it may be, it is still true that brevity is the soul of wit.

Many years ago I saw a film (title now forgotten) in which a body was concealed in a coffin at an undertakers' convention. The problem was to get the body out of the hotel without anyone suspecting its existence. Unfortunately, one coffin looks much like another - so the problem became a variation of the old shell game. It was funny, fast moving, bordering on farce and yet never going over the top - and it successfully preserved the dignity of the corpus delicti. In essence, Carry Me Back tells the same story. The difference is one of pace, style - and a sense of timing.

- Peter Harcourt, Sequence, October 1982.

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