A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

Remembering The Man From Snowy River. When I was a kid we taped this movie off the TV and I would have watched it dozens of times.



It seems like such a freakish production for the Australian film industry because it was so unashamedly epic and mainstream. I can't believe they enticed Kirk Douglas to be in it.

When we watched it as kids, there were certain moments we always loved and anticipated every time:

• During the colt-taming montage, there is a hilarious close-up of Jim's (Tom Burlinson) arse sinking delicately into the saddle for the first time.
• Harrison (Douglas) is threatening to send his daughter Jessica (Sigrid Thornton) away to boarding school. "The Presbyterian Ladies' College? I won't go!" she retorts, earning a fatherly slap across the face. We liked this because PLC was my school.
• During the climactic muster at the end, Jim pauses his horse for a while, then spurs it on with a noise like "Ha! Tsss!" We always used to find this exquisitely hilarious.
• In the same sequence, there was a scene where the horsemen splash across a river. I seem to recall that some of them fell off at that point.

This never occurred to me at the time, but there is a fairly obvious and obnoxious parallel between Jessica and the colt. Both are 'spirited', and there are men who want to crush the spirit of both, but Jim understands and is attracted to the value of 'spiritedness' in both woman and horse.

At the end of the film, Jim brings the entire mob of brumbies to Harrison (Douglas), telling him he'll be back to claim some brood mares, "and whatever else is mine [meaningful gaze at Jessica]."

How about get fucked? Instead, we got The Man From Snowy River II.

Don't even get me started on The Silver Brumby, another high-country brumby movie that our family loved, and possibly still the crowning glory of Russell Crowe's career. Hilariously, some genius on the internet has made audio grabs of the lines that we used to love quoting to each other, so you can now join in this proud tradition:

"I've got your daughter now, silver devil!"

"Monday is washing day, is every doggie happy"

"She came back to me, silver horse! Hahahahahahaha!"