The Picture Show Man

Clip 3: Men of many talents

Taken from the feature The Picture Show Man (1977)

Original title classification G – this clip chosen to be PG

Curator’s clip description

Pym (John Meillon) entertains a small-town audience with his hilarious version of a song-and-dance man. Larry (Harold Hopkins) lights a lime pellet that will produce ‘limelight’ for projection. Freddie (John Ewart) accompanies the images with an eye for the pretty widow nearby (Jeanie Drynan).

Curator’s notes

An affectionate and funny evocation of what a night at the pictures was like in a small town in the silent days – somewhere between a vaudeville show and a church hall sing-along. Note that the projector was hand-cranked, which allowed the projectionist to speed up or slow down, to match the action onscreen.

The sequence is beautifully constructed, to set up the seduction of the widow, with the music continuing through as Freddie arrives at her home next day to tune her instrument.

Paul Byrnes, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

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This clip shows a travelling picture show in the hall of a small Australian country town in the 1920s. It opens with the ‘picture show man’, Maurice Pym (John Meillon), entertaining the audience with a vaudeville song and dance routine. Pym’s son Larry (Harold Hopkins) ignites a lime pellet, which produces light for the projection of the film show. The clip then cuts between shots of Larry hand-cranking the projector, the silent black-and-white film being screened in the hall, and the pianist Freddie (John Ewart). Freddie accompanies the silent film, while making eyes at an attractive young widow in the audience. The melodramatic score played by Freddie continues into the next sequence, in which we see him visiting the widow’s house.

Educational value points

The clip depicts a travelling picture show in the 1920s, a time when film was the most popular form of entertainment in Australia. In the early days of cinema, entertainers known as ‘picture show men’ toured country towns and remote areas across Australia to exhibit films. The picture show man, equipped with a basic projector and a canvas screen, would set up in the local hall or in warmer weather in the open air. The program was initially composed of short actuality footage, but after 1906 feature films were screened.

Many picture show men had a vaudeville background and devoted the first part of their program to vaudeville acts. Initially, films were shown in vaudeville entertainments that featured brief ‘turns’, such as song-and-dance routines, comic acts, dance numbers and acrobatics, but vaudeville was eventually eclipsed by cinema. The ‘Tap, tap’ song performed by Meillon in this clip was composed for the film and became a minor hit on Australian radio.

In the 1920s, silent films were accompanied by a pianist or organist, and in larger cinemas by an orchestra. As seen in the clip, the pianist played an important part in travelling picture shows, accompanying films with appropriate music, sometimes using a supplied score but more often improvising. Later in the film Freddie, the pianist, says, ‘You’ve got to make the audience feel the right emotion at the right time’. Music also disguised the sound of the hand-cranked projectors.

The clip draws attention to the use of music in the film. The melodramatic piano score played by Freddie continues into the next scene, in which Freddie visits the young widow. The part played by music in eliciting an emotional response from the audience may have been made more obvious by the presence of the piano player during the silent era, whereas today this music is part of the film soundtrack.

As depicted in the clip, early projectors used limelight to project large bright images to sizable audiences. Small blocks of lime were heated to white incandescence by a hot flame in a retort (container) beside the projector. The flame issued from a gas jet and was produced by mixing hydrogen and oxygen gases that were stored in metal cylinders. This method was hazardous and, combined with the use of highly flammable nitrate film, sometimes resulted in fires. Limelight was also used for stage lighting and gave rise to the expression ‘being in the limelight’.

Film is a series of still images run together through a projector. In the 1920s, as shown in the clip, most film projectors were hand-cranked, using a handle on the side of the projector. Two turns per second was average, but the projectionist could turn the crank slower or faster to slow down or speed up the action. Reels often had instructions on how fast each scene should be shown. 16 frames per second (fps) was the standard for silent films. This slow rate (today, film is shown at a rate of 24 fps) produced a flicker, which gave movies the name ‘flicks’.

The Picture Show Man was inspired by a true story. After seeing Joan Long interviewed about The Passionate Industry (1973), her documentary on early Australian cinema, E Lyle Penn sent her an unpublished manuscript about his experiences as a youth travelling with his picture show man father. Long used the manuscript as a basis for her fictional screenplay, as well as drawing on her own extensive research into Australian cinema history.

The film was produced by Joan Long, a deeply-committed advocate for Australian cinema who made two documentaries about the industry, The Pictures That Moved (1971) and The Passionate Industry (1973). Long worked as a director and scriptwriter for the Commonwealth Film Unit (now Film Australia) before forming Limelight Productions in 1975. She produced Silver City (1984) and Emerald City (1989), and co-produced Puberty Blues (1981). She was instrumental in establishing the National Film and Sound Archive to preserve Australia’s film history and was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 1980 for services to the Australian film industry.