Based on author John O’Grady’s best-selling novel of the same name, director Michael Powell’s 1966 classic They’re a Weird Mob follows Italian migrant Nino (Walter Chiari) as he arrives in Sydney and gradually acclimatises to life down under.
Expecting to start work as a sports journalist for his cousin’s magazine, Nino discovers the publication has gone bust and his cousin has done a runner.
Desperate for a job, he accepts a position as a labourer on a construction site and is introduced to hard yakka work and the Aussie accoutrements that come with it: cups of tea, a bunch of sheila-admiring red-blooded colleagues and, of course, a lot of beer.
The premise of the film is a reverse Crocodile Dundee – a fish-out-of-water comedy about a goofy, good-natured Italian who comes to Australia (rather than leaves it) and entertains the locals as he bumbles through day-to-day life, excusing his many faux pas with a nervous smile and a glassy-eyed look.
While the 1970s is credited as the decade of great renaissance in local cinema (a movement of film known as the Australian New Wave), the 1960s are considered a virtual dead zone. Weird Mob was a rare hit, collecting around $2m at the box office. It left a lasting impression in a long line of films about migrants establishing life in Australia. It also arrived before the advent of multiculturalism in the 70s, which acknowledged the right for citizens to maintain their own culture.
Like some of the great films that came shortly after it (such as Wake in Fright from Canadian director Ted Kotcheff and Walkabout from Nicolas Roeg, a Brit), They’re A Weird Mob’s authenticity as a story about a foreigner making sense of Australian culture was informed by the perspective of its film-maker. Powell was an Englishmen whose magnum opus is probably 1948’s The Red Shoes (made in partnership with Emeric Pressburger), described by Martin Scorsese as his favourite film.
Powell uses comedy to inflate the outsider-looking-in perspective, as if he’s examining the Australian character as a kind of weird animal flapping about in its natural habitat. The film’s opening shot depicts children in an observatory looking at a huge globe with the outline of Australia facing the camera.
Voiceover narration begins: “Australians live down under. Like flies on the ceiling they never fall off.” The next shot is of business people walking down a busy city street, except the image is upside down. “Of course they see themselves like this” – and the image is flipped right way up.
Powell introduces the film with a jokey and playful spirit then slows the tempo and reigns in the comedy for a second half, and particularly a final act, about Nino finding romance and building a home. The song In This Man’s Country (chorus: “It’s a man’s country, sweetheart”) plays not once but three times, the most striking example of the film’s age.
Mostly, thought, They’re a Weird Mob holds up surprising well as an entertaining time capsule and a compilation of many things that haven’t changed – from small gestures like returning shouts of beer at a bar to ongoing city rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney (highlighted in a scene featuring a cameo from Graham Kennedy) and the generous spirit and welcoming attitudes of Australian people.
When Nino informs a prospective employer he is Italian, he is told: “Doesn’t make a difference to me, mate, as long as you can do the job.” The film may suggest a less cynical time and culture – a sun-tipped nostalgia light years away from the nasty shock of modern feel-bad dramas such as writer/director Geoffrey Wright’s Romper Stomper – but the protagonist’s passage isn’t all smiles and Kumbaya.
A drunken man on a ferry blabbers abusively about “dagos”, commands foreigners to go home and whines that “a man’s country is not his own anymore”. As we were recently reminded, racist rants on public transport are still part of the Australian fabric. But They’re a Weird Mob is hardly warts and all. It’s a warming and optimistic story told with unpretentious charm. To use the fair dinkum language communicated by the film’s narrator, it’s a bewt sort.
