Australian
Screen

Clip description

Three Australian cavalrymen explain the game of two-up to some Egyptian men, in a crowded Cairo street. Red Gallagher (Grant Taylor) and his mates Jim (Chips Rafferty) and Larry (Pat Twohill) ride their winnings – three donkeys – into a local cabaret, the Cafe Chantant, where dancing beauties and eager ‘hostesses’ gather round the men, to the horror of the proprietor.

Curator’s notes

The legend of the larrikin digger was well established in earlier films of the 1930s, especially the comedies of Pat Hanna (see Diggers), which had an influence on the laconic character that Chips Rafferty would make even more famous – but this sequence is the model for a similar scene in Peter Weir’s Gallipoli, in which Mel Gibson and his mates ride donkeys through a later version of a movie Cairo.

Chauvel had recently returned from an extended study trip to Hollywood, and it shows in the way he films the Cafe Chantant. It’s a Hollywood-ised version of a Middle-Eastern cabaret, complete with scantily-clad dancers (although it’s true that Chauvel never needed much encouragement to include such scenes – see In the Wake of the Bounty). The dancing girls attracted attention from the Australian censors, who wanted the scene cut. The censor was overruled by the Minister for Customs, Eric Harrison, and the film was allowed to be shown uncut. The original Australian release version ran 101 minutes, but this was cut down to 89 minutes for the UK release.