Newsfront (1978) on Netflix
In postwar Australia, brothers Len and Frank Maguire shoot weekly newsreels for competing companies. Len resists the changes of the times, while younger brother Frank welcomes them.
- Netflix2.7/5
- IMDb6.9/10965 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes55%
Plot summary
Len Maguire and Frank Maguire, brothers, earn their living as cameramen for rival Australian newsreel companies in the years after the war. The work is the weekly reel shown in cinemas, and it sends the crews after whatever the country is doing: Robert Menzies coming back as Prime Minister, a 1951 vote on outlawing the Communist Party, the arrival of postwar migrants, a campaign against rabbits, and the Redex Reliability Trial. The brothers meet the same changing world differently. Len holds to what he knows, while Frank, the younger, is glad of anything new in his own life or in the world. The Hunter Valley floods of 1955 and the 1956 Summer Olympics give them demanding assignments.
Cast
- John Deaseas Ken
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Newsfront (1978)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The New South Wales Film Corporation insisted that seven minutes be cut out of the film for its overseas release, after it had been shown at Cannes in 1978 and proved popular there.
- Ellis fell out with Noyce, who had been hired to direct and had worked with him on the script, and demanded that his name be taken off the credits.
- Ellis said in a 1996 interview that the legend of his enormous script was nonsense: it had been set out one short scene to a page, so it ran to about 300 pages, but it played at maybe two and a quarter hours for a story covering ten years.
- Shot on location in Sydney, the film mixes black and white with color and works actual newsreel footage into the story it tells.
