Carry Me Back

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

Carry Me Back, New Zealand, 1982

Kiwi Films
Director: John Reid
Producer: Graeme Cowley
Associate Producer: Peter Barker
Executive Producer: Garry Hannam
Story: Joy Cowley
Screenplay: Derek Morton, Keith Aberdein, John Reid
Director of Photography: Graeme Cowley
Editors: Simon Reece, Michael Horton
Sound Director: Don Reynolds
Art Director: Jim Barr
Music: Tim Bridgewater, James Hall

With: Arthur Donovan (Grant Tilly), Jimmy Donovan (Kelly Johnson), Aunty Bird (Dorothy McKegg), T K Donovan (Derek Hardwick), Girl (Joanne Mildenhall), George (Alex Trousdell), Brian (Frank Edwards), Craig (Michael Haig), Geoff (John Anderson), Andy (Brian Sergeant), Winton (John Bach), Stanley (Peter Tait), Traffic cop (Bruno Lawrence)

35mm, PG-Contains Coarse language, 84 minutes

“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.” – Peter Harcourt, Sequence, October 1982.

“A brand new comedy from John Reid, director of the popular Middle Age Spread, Carry Me Back has about it something of the flavour of the vintage Ealing comedies and shares with them an irreverence towards death. TK Donovan hasn’t left his South Island farm in ten years, and so his sons, Arthur and Jimmy, are surprised when the old man decides to join them on a trip to Wellington to watch the local team play in a football final. There’s a boozy crossing on the ferry, and then a successful game won by the local team. That night Arthur and Jimmy go out on the town, while old TK quickly tires of watching strippers and wanders off on his own. Next morning he is found dead in his motel bed and to their horror his sons discover in his will (which he always carried with him) that the farm will be left to the football club unless TK is buried on his beloved property - and the law won’t allow that unless he actually died on it. Arthur and Jimmy are faced with the problem of smuggling a very recalcitrant body back to the South Island, and they enlist the somewhat dubious help of the formidable Aunty Bird, an estranged relative with a will of her own. With well-developed characters, a witty script, and a good eye for visual gags, Reid keeps the film moving along at such a rate that the implausibilities aren’t noticed - or don’t matter. There are visual allusions to other films (Polanski’s Two Men and a Wardrobe, Chabrol’s La femme infidele), but the sense of humour is basically very Kiwi and there are a number of good running gags of which Blake Edwards would not be ashamed (including the fact that just about every authority figure in the film turns out to be a foreigner). A special word, too, for Graeme Cowley’s photography which gives the film its very handsome look. As for the actors, they are all a pleasure to watch. Grant Tilly as Arthur is hardly recognisable as the same actor who played the teacher in Middle Age Spread and shows considerable versatility; Dorothy McKegg, the wife in the earlier film, is in extravagantly fine form as Aunty Bird; and Kelly Johnson, also to be seen in Goodbye Pork Pie, brings a sharp sense of comic timing to the role of Jimmy. Good comedy is rare these days, and so John Reid’s appearance on the film scene is more than welcome.” – David Stratten, Sydney Film Festival

“Carry Me Back is a dag of a movie. Its central gag is a will which decrees that unless oldtimer TK Donovan dies down on his farm his money goes to the Rugby Union. His two sons take him to see a game of footie in the big smoke. Dad dies - so the boys have to sneak dead Dad back undetected. This is a small movie, inexpensively produced, belonging to the genre of grotesque humour earlier mined by Goodbye Pork Pie. The humour is local in its references. Bodily functions are magnified into spiritual states; all humans are reduced into caricatures set loose in a toytown New Zealand. Women exist on the periphery of this male fantasy world in which every bloke is a lad on the bash, tilting at the windmills of authority coming home to rest back on the farm. The route is circuitous. Trains, departing ferries, wicked aunts and bad weather all take their toll. This isn’t a film to reveal our society’s heart, palpitating and bare. Its main aim is to entertain. But even in entertaining, films describe and the country this film describes is, on one hand, recognisable physically as our own - indeed it has never looked better than it does in Graeme Cowley’s cinematography - but whether it is our own land in even some of its complexity I very much doubt. For example, the central action in this film involves countryfolk coming into town for a footie match. These latterday cowboys pose a limited kind of social threat - it is the acceptable anarchism of lads on the piss rather than, shall we say, a lynch mob searching the streets of Hamilton for protesters after a cancelled Springbok match. We as a nation are growing up. Are the films being made here growing up with us? Carry Me Back sidesteps the question. It is set back in a time ‘when blokes were blokes and sheilas were their mums’. The tone is established beautifully with the film’s opening image (which I won’t give away.) But this 50s tone, which allows a kind of radio serial cosiness, is not sustained. Whoever heard of saunas in the 50s? Or anti-racist graffiti, for that matter? But this is a minor carp. For we can accept the period setting on trust. What, however, is the point? Except that mentally too much of the country still exists there? And this is where the mass market lies? Director John Reid tries to introduce some alternative moments into this ‘Son of Pork Pie’. He provides vignettes which tacitly offer a critique of the social mores on which the film is based: booze artists oblivious to anything, for example, ride through landscapes of shimmering beauty. But these moments of distancing perception work against an overall consistency of tone. The criticism implicit in social realism stops the film skidding off in the direction of surreal grotesquery, which is perhaps where all these characters really belong. Given this unevenness of tone, the main performers act well. Derek Hardwick as the choleric Dad turns his role into a quiet tour de force. In one scene, looking at a young waitress in an empty grillroom, he manages to evoke the whole sexual history of a certain kind of post-war kiwi male. Dorothy McKegg performs with a relish which recalls the cultural subversion of an Edna Everage. Only Kelly Johnson disappoints, sleepwalking through a role he has played so many times, it would seem, that if fails to awaken fresh responses in him. Joanne Mildenhall is, as they say, a fresh young face. Carry Me Back was made last summer, during the local movie gold rush. Now local films seem threatened. This one is no masterpiece. Dags rarely are. But it may be one of the last to get through. See it.” — Peter Wells, Listener, 2/10/1982

One of the great things about seeing early examples of New Zealand feature films at the Film Archive, is that these films are such important and brilliant examples of art that document and reflect upon our culture as New Zealanders. Sure, the films are usually great works on their own right, but what makes them so special is how they are utterly unique to our world and our stories... Read the 2008 Texture review of Carry Me Back

Screenings: Carry Me Back screened on 5 November 2008 as part of the Wellingtonista season of films.