The Waybacks
- 1918
- 1h 17m
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Great fun - but only 13 minutes still exists.
Sadly only 13 minutes of this film survive. It is a knockabout "Dad and Dave" style comedy, about a group of country yokels who go to the city.
There seem to be a lot of Waybacks - a very large family. We see them in various rural situations - best bits being a scene where the whole family tries to get in a cart and it collapses, and some very cute courting scenes.
It appears they filmed on location without warning the real inhabitants, and many of the shots include crowds of people watching the action (and the camera). Very nice scene of a train pulling into a station - with the passengers obviously not expecting the Waybacks to be getting on their train!
The best scene in the film is probably outside a cinema, where one of the Wayback boys has a fist fight with a Charlie Chaplin impersonator. Nice symbolism here of the conflict between Aussie films and Hollywood.
All in all this looks like it was a very funny film. Apparently it was hugely popular and was re-released in both 1922 and 1925. What a shame more of it did not survive. The surviving footage is held at ScreenSound Australia, the National Screen and Sound Archive, in Canberra.
There seem to be a lot of Waybacks - a very large family. We see them in various rural situations - best bits being a scene where the whole family tries to get in a cart and it collapses, and some very cute courting scenes.
It appears they filmed on location without warning the real inhabitants, and many of the shots include crowds of people watching the action (and the camera). Very nice scene of a train pulling into a station - with the passengers obviously not expecting the Waybacks to be getting on their train!
The best scene in the film is probably outside a cinema, where one of the Wayback boys has a fist fight with a Charlie Chaplin impersonator. Nice symbolism here of the conflict between Aussie films and Hollywood.
All in all this looks like it was a very funny film. Apparently it was hugely popular and was re-released in both 1922 and 1925. What a shame more of it did not survive. The surviving footage is held at ScreenSound Australia, the National Screen and Sound Archive, in Canberra.
helpful•10
- David-240
- Jul 13, 2001
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- The Waybacks from Dingo Flats
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- Runtime1 hour 17 minutes
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- Sound mix
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