It's no overstatement to say that Gulpilil's Fingerbone Bill was one of the most powerful portrayals of a black man in any film in that era. David Gulpilil's marvellous performance fitted into the wider project by Australian filmmakers to try to reform white Australian attitudes to Aboriginal culture. Storm Boy reflected the politics of the mid-1970s, in just the same way that Thiele's book reflected the early 1960s. Fingerbone Bill (Trevor Jamieson), an Aboriginal living in the same dunes, teaches the boy about Aboriginal lore and custom. Mr Percival, raised from a chick after hunters kill his mother, becomes Storm Boy's companion and best friend. He's one of the strengths of the movie, alongside the pelicans, played by a bunch of boisterous and lovable Pelecanus conspicillatus, trained for the film. He's more jovial than was Peter Cummins, but Cummins' grumpier interpretation improved on the book, by making it easier to understand why they lived this lonely life.įinn Little steps into Greg Rowe's big shoes. Jai Courtney now plays the father, Hideaway Tom, and it's true that his character is closer to the book. Jai Courtney stars as Hideaway Tom and Finn Little as Storm Boy in the new film. Which is odd, given that they say they didn't want to remake the original film. ![]() The old shack that Mike (played by Greg Rowe) shared with his reclusive father Tom (Peter Cummins) appears to have been recreated in the same sandhills on Ninety Mile Beach, on the far side of the river mouth. If you remember the original film, the location isn't just familiar, but exact. In flashback, Mike tells Madeline about growing up in the Coorong 60 years earlier. Rush plays the grown-up Storm Boy, whose real name was Mike Kingley. The new script, by Justin Monjo, bookends the story with a modern and mechanical wrap-around in which Geoffrey Rush returns from overseas to discover his teenage granddaughter Madeline (Morgana Davies) in a fearsome temper about her father's plans to redevelop the family land in the Coorong – that unique strip of coastal wetland near the mouth of the Murray River in South Australia. No, what this new mob has done is return to the book – which is more like a 60-page story – and monkey with that, instead of the film. ![]() A remake was unlikely to match its innocence, originality and emotional subtlety. The much-loved original never puts a foot wrong. The producers of this new version of Colin Thiele's classic children's story from 1963 would like it known that they did not set out to remake the 1976 film by Henri Safran.
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