Summerfield (1977)

Warning: I’m going to spoil an important element of the plot that will probably suggest most of the rest of the movie to some readers!

Teacher Simon Robinson (Nick Tate) comes to a small Australian outback town to replace a predecessor who has seemingly disappeared from the face of the Earth. Simon’s a bit put out by this, or rather by the complete disinterest everyone in town shows towards the disappearance. Even the local policeman is more interested in proper and correct car licenses than a guy gone missing. The town’s a bit weird for Simon’s taste anyway, with a populace that mostly carries various kinds of leers and sneers on their faces, and whose members lack even the tiniest smidgen of politeness. Well, the female half  (Geraldine Turner) of the couple running his guest house (apparently the Australian term for boarding house) wants to seduce him, and he being a 70s Australian film leading man isn’t going to say no, but otherwise, it’s an unfriendly and slightly creepy place. Why, even the kids he’s going to teach are greeting him with a fake hanging!

Given the general mood and the boredom that must come with the spirit of this place, Simon begins to poke around the disappearance himself, quickly if not verbally coming to the conclusion that some sort of foul play must have been involved. At least in his mind, he does connect the disappearance to Summerfield, an island separated from the rest of the area by water, a small driveway and quite a high gate, where Sally Abbott (Michelle Jarman), one of his students, lives with her mother Jenny (Elizabeth Alexander) and her uncle David (John Waters). Because he does have a bit of a problem with his libido, he also develops more than just a tiny crush on Jenny, which will not make the situation better in the long run.

Ken Hannam’s Summerfield belongs to the not inconsiderable number of Australian films that build their own little cinematic canon of the Australian gothic. Quite a few of these films have an outsider coming (or sometimes returning) to a small town in the outback where he or she encounters various strange and unfriendly locals, the threat of violence expressed through more sweaty faces than in a Spaghetti Western, and some kind of terrible secret of the past one or more members of the want to keep buried, and which shapes the places present and future.

In Summerfield’s case, the secret is incest, which, going by the way various family portraits are shot, may have been going on for generations as some sort of family tradition, but which at least in this contemporary case is perfectly consensual (cue a discussion of how consensual sibling incest can ever be in your own mind, if that floats your boat, imaginary reader). In something of a clever twist, it’s not so much the hidden secrets bubbling to the surface and the past taking control of the present that leads to the film’s very 70s ending, but Simon not being willing (or able) to leave well enough alone; and as the nasty little twist at the end suggests, he has set in motion the death of three people for no good reason at all. But then, nothing Simon does during the film suggests he is very good at thinking through the consequences of the things he does, or trying to get into the heads of the country people he so clearly dislikes. On the other hand, you only ever know if something should actually be truly left alone or not once you’ve figured out what it is about.


Hannam’s direction style is a bit dry sometimes, perhaps not too surprising from someone working in TV more than in the movies, but there are also quite a few scenes that really drive home the particularly Australian gothic mood of the film. The film features quite a few dramatic shots of flat empty land that don’t suggest a freedom of wide open spaces but the threat of being surrounded by nothing (or nothing but people who just might be a bit crazy thanks to their surroundings), close-ups of the sweaty faces of character actors who look as if they are about to lose it every minute (but never really do), and other things that suggest a Hammer movie but by day and with too much space. Summerfield as a place is particularly great, like the idea of the traditional gothic manor turned Australian and (70s) contemporary, its dwellers isolating themselves from a part of the country that’s already too isolated for comfort, breeding behaviours rather frowned upon in less isolated spaces.