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| home | news lFilm Review: Black and WhiteBy Ray Bennett 19 January 2004, LONDON (Hollywood Reporter) - In a remote desert town in South Australia in 1958, a 9-year-old girl is found raped and murdered. On the flimsiest evidence, local police almost immediately arrest a young Aboriginal man and obtain a confession. Only the efforts of a stubborn, inexperienced Adelaide lawyer stand between the accused and the hangman. Craig Lahiff's sturdy courtroom drama "Black and White," based on real events, follows a predictable path and is unlikely to make substantial gains at the box office, but it's a laudable effort and certain to please fans of Robert Carlyle (news).
The "Full Monty" star plays obstinate lawyer David O'Sullivan, whose dislike of the antiquated British-based Australian judiciary drives him to take seriously a case he's obliged to take without a fee. He quickly learns that the Aboriginal, Max Stuart, played with unsentimental grace by David Ngoombujarra, is illiterate and put his mark on a confession he couldn't read. When it turns out that Curtis was in police custody for being drunk at the time the murder took place, it appears that a dismissal is inevitable. But the pathologist changes her mind and fixes the death outside the time frame of his alibi. Only when he's sent for trial does Curtis claim that the police beat him in order to obtain the confession. By now, O'Sullivan is going head-to-head with a pillar of the judicial establishment, Roderic Chamberlain, played with typical elegance and power by Charles Dance (news). More evidence emerges that tends to suggest Curtis' innocence when a compassionate priest becomes involved, but Curtis is convicted and sentenced to hang. O'Sullivan's fight to win appeals goes all the way up to a Royal Commission, putting Curtis near the hangman's door seven times, while the local newspaper -- published by one Rupert Murdoch -- gets on the bandwagon to defend him. Ben Mendelsohn plays the young Murdoch as a callow opportunist, and the film suggests that his enthusiasm for the campaign swiftly ended when he was threatened with prosecution for seditious libel. The film dips a toe into the role of newspapers influencing trials but drops it as a topic to focus on O'Sullivan's class struggle with Chamberlain. Screenwriter Louis Nowra and director Lahiff develop that theme effectively and take the trouble to invest Chamberlain with considerable human dimension. There is a clever scene in which the aristocratic hopeful for the chief justice's chair snarls out his view of the case to his wife and their genteel friends, sparing them no brutal detail of the rape and murder as he believes they happened. O'Sullivan runs into almost uniformly supercilious representatives of the British legal establishment, however, all with condescending stares and snooty voices. But the lawyer's dependence on his reluctant but loyal partner, played sympathetically by Kerry Fox, is well drawn, and at no point does Carlyle allow himself to showboat. His is a fully professional performance that shows no strain from the fact that he carries the film on his shoulders. Lahiff shows little visual flair, and the film will fit nicely on the small screen. It's a grim tale not told in a grim way; an honorable argument not angry enough. A bit more of Chamberlain's superb self-belief might have given the piece a lot more power. Black and White (Courtroom drama, color, no MPAA rating, 1:40) Cast: David O'Sullivan: Robert Carlyle; Roderic Chamberlain: Charles Dance; Helen Devaney: Kerry Fox; Father Tom Dixon: Colin Friels (news); Rupert Murdoch: Ben Mendelsohn; Max Stuart: David Ngoombujarra. Director: Craig Lahiff; Screenwriter: Louis Nowra; Producers: Helen Leake, Nik Powell; Director of photography: Geoffrey Simpson; Production designer: Murray Picknett; Costume designer: Annie Marshallp; Editor: Lee Smith. Source:Hollywood Reporter Black and White Movie Trailer (Quicktime Hi-Res) Not everything in Black and White makes sense9 January, 2004 - As you flick through the 523 channels on Sky satellite television, you probably never thought of Rupert Murdoch as a hero. Well, according to this film, he is … he may have swamped our small screens with channels flogging us dodgy steam-cleaners and fake-silver candlesticks, but when he was starting out to get a grip on the world's media he was a crusading, liberal-minded defender of the downtrodden and oppressed. When Murdoch was a young shaver in the 1950s and with his first newspaper struggling against mightier opposition, he took up the case of a Aboriginal man facing the death penalty for a crime he didn't commit. Actually, the campaign seems to be more about boosting circulation than saving the man and doing justice. You're probably better off avoiding this…they're selling nose hair-trimmers on satellite TV. Star Rating: 1/5 Source: Irish Examiner BLACK AND WHITE Kevin O'Sullivan at the movies 4/5 January 8 2004 - Any film in which the hero is named O'Sullivan is obviously off to a good start as far as I'm concerned. But this superb production continues the Australian tradition of fine movie-making and needs no biased support from the likes of me. Based on the true story of aborigine Max Stuart and the landmark case that dragged the antiquated Southern Australian legal system into the 20th century, director Craig Lahiff's beautifully shot drama is a thoroughly absorbing treat. Hard-drinking Stuart was sentenced to death after a dubious investigation into the horrific 1958 rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl. Irish-born lawyer David O'Sullivan was then forced by Adelaide's legal-aid lottery system to defend "guilty as sin" Max. Like so many people of the same name, O'Sullivan was a profoundly decent man who concluded that his client was the victim of police violence and the rampant racism which almost automatically condemned accused aborigines. Robert Carlyle's portrayal of a tempestuous attorney who put his career on the line is just mesmerising. The emotional intensity of the scenes in which he sits talking to Max (David Ngoombujarra) in his Death Row cell brought tears to my eyes. What a stunning actor Mr Ngoombujarra is. The roll of honour continues with Charles Dance, who - as ruthless Crown Prosecutor Roderic Chamberlain - captures the colonial conservatism which made cities such as Adelaide more English than England. One of Max's most strident supporters, a certain Rupert Murdoch (Ben Mendelsohn), used his first paper, the Adelaide News, to launch a volatile campaign. Now, whatever happened to him? Stuart was saved from death. But nothing is ever black and white. Source: Daily Mirror Murray's mug asks: 'How much can a man take?'
By Nigel Andrews January 7 2004 - Robert Carlyle plays an Irish lawyer in Australia in Black and White. Like Billy Connolly in Samurai, he obviously won a free working holiday to do cod-Hibernian schtik on the other side of the world. Carlyle plays the truth-based legal beagle David O'Sullivan, who laboured to save a stitched-up Aborigine accused of murder (David Ngoombujarra) from the gallows. After this 1959 "landmark trial", apparently, police behaviour improved, the judges improved, the law improved, and no doubt everyone started helping old ladies cross the street. Even the young Rupert Murdoch (Ben Mendelssohn), marshalling his family tabloid for truth and justice, gets a promotional cameo. Director Craig Lahiff will laugh all the way to the bank. He has won overseas distribution for this pie-eyed, pedestrian telemovie manqué. And it's bound to show on Sky, isn't it? Source: Financial Times Cruise charges into battle for Oscar glory Tim Robey 9 January 2004 - Black and White, a slow-burning drama about a real-life Australian cause célèbre in the 1950s, concerns itself with a shade of grey · the area of judicial doubt known as "not proven". Robert Carlyle plays solicitor David O'Sullivan, who drew out of the hat a legal aid case that effectively destroyed his career. The rape and murder of a young girl in a desert town is pinned, in a quickfire prologue, on Aborigine Max Stuart (the excellent David Ngoombujarra). Evidence is circumstantial at best, his confession in police custody highly dubious. O'Sullivan nonetheless fails to secure an acquittal, and ends up bashing his head against the brick wall of appeal hearings to save his client from hanging. Only when the press take up their cause · enter Ben Mendelsohn as the young Rupert Murdoch · does the judiciary start to get nervous. The screenplay is clunkily expository, and Craig Lahiff's direction is TV-movie stolid. What keeps it interesting is the matchless hauteur of Charles Dance, no mere courtroom foil as the crown prosecutor wielding the law like a truncheon. Source:Daily Telegraph Black and White Alan Morrison Issue 176 February 2004 - A poor “black fellah” accused of the rape and murder of a young white girl, a white lawyer determined to defend him, a small-minded white community who want to railroad a guilty verdict… comparisons to To Kill A Mockingbird are inevitable, but shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow this ambiguous take on a famous Australian trial from 1959. Robert Carlyle, a million miles away from psycho villain mode, is the inexperienced lawyer handed the case, and he makes a fine job of vocalising the audience’s frustration at the establishment’s handling of events. The title doesn’t just refer to the racial divide, but also to the newspaper campaign spearheaded by Rupert Murdoch (Ben Mendelsohn) — perhaps the origins of the uneasy mix of moral condemnation and voyeuristic sensationalism that still fuels the tabloids’ fire today. Source: Empire Black And White A conventional courtroom drama from antipodean director Craig Lahiff, based on a real-life miscarriage of justice that rocked Australia in the late 1950s On paper, Black And White seems a reasonable prospect. It has both a respected international cast and a script by the playwright Louis Nowra about a groundbreaking legal case, which revealed the racial prejudice within the ranks of the Australian police and judicial system. Robert Carlyle plays the inexperienced Adelaide lawyer David O'Sullivan given the "bad lottery ticket" of representing Aborigine Max Stuart (Ngoombujarra), who has been accused of raping and murdering a nine-year-old white girl in December 1958 in a small South Australian community. The solicitor and his colleague Helen Devaney (Fox) have doubts about the validity of the confession extracted by the police, given that their client is an illiterate with far-from-perfect English. Up against a formidable crown prosecutor Chamberlain (Dance) at the trial, O'Sullivan can't prevent Max receiving a guilty verdict. But undeterred, he launches the first in a series of appeals and finds assistance in his campaign from a tyro newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch (Mendelsohn), who sees the chance to increase sales by challenging the establishment. There's something pedestrian about the storytelling in Black And White, both in narrative and visual terms, with the title unfortunately appropriate in regard to the functional characterisations. True, there's a measure of ambiguity about whether or not Max is actually guilty; an extended and detailed flashback, provided by Chamberlain at a social gathering, provides a plausible case for the accused being the child murderer. Yet throughout the plodding narrative, we're directed to feel sympathy for the tenacious underdogs (Max, O'Sullivan, Devaney), and contempt for the heartlessly ambitious Chamberlain and the brutish cops, who show no remorse for their actions towards a suspect. The contrast between the opposing sides is heavy-handed; Chamberlain enjoys a drink in the plush surroundings of a gentleman's club with fellow barristers while O'Sullivan and co make do with a beer in an ordinary pub. At least Dance's character has a home life, albeit an unhappy one in which he and his wife endure a loveless marriage. O'Sullivan and Devaney don't seem to do anything but work. There are no back stories provided for them, no lovers or families that might throw some extra light on their rigid personalities. And the one significant black character, Max, becomes ever marginalised, leaving us with that familiar situation whereby in a film ostensibly about racial prejudice, the perspectives of the white figures take centre stage. An epilogue reveals that O'Sullivan was never allowed to practise law again, and having left the state to find work, struggled to settle and was killed just a few years later in a car crash. Perhaps that decline from national celebrity to boozy anonymity might have made a more interesting film. Verdict Source: Channel Four Black And White (15) Reviewed by Matthew Turner Drama about a famous Australian trial from 1959, starring Robert Carlyle as an ambitious but inexperienced lawyer defending an Aborigine accused of rape and murder. Two out of Five stars Lahiff’s drama is best filed under “Worthy But Dull” - it starts well but tails off badly into a series of choppy, disconnected scenes. Plus, it’s hard to like a film that tries to make a hero out of Rupert Murdoch. As far as courtroom dramas are concerned, it probably isn’t the most fortunate of weeks for Black and White to open, given that the star-powered Runaway Jury is set to open a week later. Craig Lahiff’s drama is well-acted and tells a historically interesting story, but ultimately feels more like a TV drama and is let down by a poor second half. Set in 1959, the film stars Robert Carlyle as David O’Sullivan, a young, ambitious but inexperienced lawyer in Adelaide. He and his legal partner Helen Devaney (Kerry Fox) are given the legal aid case of an Aborigine named Max Stuart (David Ngoombujarra), who is accused of raping and murdering a nine year old girl. O’Sullivan comes to believe that Stuart has been framed by local authorities interested in a speedy conviction and decides to take a stand. In doing so, he clashes with Roderic Chamberlain (Charles Dance), South Australia’s powerful and equally ambitious Crown Prosecutor and the case begins to take on a ‘David and Goliath’ quality. However, O’Sullivan receives help from a source that is bound to raise a few mutterings in the audience – a young (and, er, ambitious) newspaper man named Rupert Murdoch (Ben Mendolsohn) is keen to garner publicity for his tabloid, the Australian News and he rallies public opinion behind O’Sullivan’s cause. (The case is eventually responsible for the setting up of a public defence fund). Black and White starts well, largely thanks to a winning, genuinely moving performance from Ngoombujarra and reliable work from both Carlyle and Fox. Dance is good too – he has honed his Hissable Villain routine to perfection over the years. However, the film begins to drag about halfway through and then gets practically lost in a series of choppy, seemingly disconnected scenes that are a result of the lengthy appeals process - there are times when it looks as if entire scenes are actually missing and it lacks the emotional climax it desperately needs. The film also suffers from a distinct ‘small screen’ quality and would undoubtedly play better as a TV drama. It’s also a bit of a stretch to really get behind a film that asks you to root for Rupert Murdoch as its hero, true story or no true story (though, to be fair, Mendolsohn isn’t bad). In short, Black and White is mostly watchable and well-acted but neither as engaging nor as exciting as it needs to be. Source: London Movie Review Black and White Review by Rich Cline 20 November 2002 - Based on true events, this deeply involving film is not only a terrific story but it's also very timely in the issues it examines. In late 1958 in South Australia, a 9-year-old girl was brutally raped and murdered. The local cops went straight for an Aboriginal man (Ngoombujarra) and railroaded him through the system, even though he was illiterate and had a fairly tenuous grasp of English. His lawyers (Carlyle and Fox) didn't stand a chance up against the high-powered prosecutor (Dance). Over the next year they continue with a series of appeals, taking the case ever higher and attracting the support of young newspaper owner Rupert Murdoch (Mendelsohn), who rather irresponsibly stirs up public opinion but actually gives justice a chance in the process. Lahiff's film is beautifully assembled to tell the story clearly and fairly. It grabs hold of us from the very beginning as we see a judicial system so clearly weighed in favour of the privileged classes, and of course our sympathies go immediately to the underdog. But the film is careful to present all sides of the story without passing judgement. It's basically a tale of the outsider--the native man who has no family, the lawyers who are up against the system, the priest (Friels) who disobeys his bishop to help, the newspaper owner standing in the face of the local police detective (Billing), and so on. The film does lack a certain level of subtlety; it paints all the characters far too starkly. Just a few shades of grey would have helped make, for instance, Dance's smug elitist snob even vaguely human! He comes across as a bull-headed, almost cartoonish villain, as do the deeply racist cops. While the excellent Carlyle and Fox are rather hapless heroes. Still, there's a clever twist in perspective at the end that makes the final epilogue somewhat unnerving. This is a great story nicely told. Source: Shadows on the Wall Black and White joins a long line of newspaper dramas
Dave Calhoun gets the scoop on movie reporters January 08, 2004 - The Australian film Black and White is the latest liaison in the big screen’s enduring, and occasionally tempestuous, relationship with newspapers and journalists. In this retelling of a 1958 murder case in a remote part of Australia, we watch as the editor of The Adelaide News, Rohan Rivett (John Gregg) and his young publisher, Rupert Murdoch (Ben Mendelsohn), campaign for a fair trial for an Aboriginal man accused of killing a young girl. Mendelsohn’s Murdoch — convinced that the death penalty is wrong — argues with crusading zeal, “my newspaper can help save Max from death”. Somewhat unusually, Black and White paints a newspaper as a force for good and is entirely free of cynicism towards the fourth estate. Usually cinema has a more jaundiced eye. The portrayal of the unscrupulous Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane (1941) and the demonic editor in The Front Page (1931) and its two remakes — Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940) and Billy Wilder’s The Front Page (1974) — still endure in such films as Ron Howard’s The Paper (1994). It’s the figure of the lone reporter, campaigning against injustice (or the mean-mindedness of editor and colleagues) who emerges as the hero. All The President’s Men (1976) showed Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) of The Washington Post exposing the full scale of the Watergate scandal. Similarly, in last year’s Veronica Guerin, Cate Blanchett’s portrayal of the Irish journalist’s fatal stand against drug barons firmly cast the journalist as martyr. In these films, the journalist becomes a renegade hero, like Denzel Washington’s investigative reporter in The Pelican Brief (1993), battling against injustice with little concern for his or her own safety. And let’s not forget: Clark Kent was a journalist when not otherwise engaged. On the flipside, nothing rivals Burt Lancaster’s brooding portrayal of a newspaper columnist, J. J. Hunsecker, in Alexander Mackendrick’s noir masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success (1957) for a celluloid take on the corrupt journalist, wielding immense power for his own gain. When Lancaster, who rarely emerges from the shadows, dryly responds to another columnist’s slur with the line “it wasn’t me he criticised, it was my readers, 60 million of them” , it’s impossible not to shiver at his absolute delusion. The veteran Chicago journalist Studs Terkel spoke recently of the dull silence of the modern newsroom, without the clatter of typewriters and chatter of inky-fingered editors. Not surprisingly, perhaps, today’s world of laptops and plastic coffee cups hasn’t tickled the fancy of film-makers too often in recent years. So, as well as the journalist-as-action-hero (The Pelican Brief), the foreign correspondent has featured prominently in the later history of the genre. In the 1970s and 1980s a veritable sub-genre emerged in the US (Under Fire, Salvador, The Killing Fields, The Year of Living Dangerously), no doubt reflecting the effects of the Vietnam experience on the American psyche. Taking the genre into this century, one film, released in the US last autumn but yet to be shown here, is unlikely to reverse any damage done by cinema (or journalists themselves) to the reputation of the print media. In Shattered Glass, Hayden Christensen plays Stephen Glass, the young American journalist whose glittering career at the New Republic magazine from 1995 to 1998 produced 41 articles, 27 of which were later found to be wholly or largely fabricated. There’s also a TV movie in the pipeline about Jayson Blair, the New York Times journalist who was sacked last year for fraud and plagiarism. Both Glass and Blair can now rejoice that at least one of their stories — their own life story — is being taken very seriously indeed. Source: The Times Black And White (2004) Reviewed by Jamie Russell 6 January 2004 - Robert Carlyle brings the Australian legal system to its knees in Black And White, a solid courtroom drama in which nothing is as clear-cut as the title suggests. Dim-witted Aboriginal fairground worker Max Stuart (David Ngoombujarra) has been accused of raping and murdering a nine-year-old girl in 50s Oz. Enter crusading Irish-Australian lawyer David O'Sullivan (Carlyle), who's convinced that Max has been stitched up and is determined to save him from the gallows. Squaring up against this young upstart is pompous prosecutor Roderic Chamberlain QC (Charles Dance, in lip-curling toff mode), whose superior air, keen intelligence and powdered wig makes him a fearsome adversary for Carlyle's small-fry solicitor. But that's not all: Carlyle also has small-town prejudice to overcome. Based on a true story, this Antipodean drama plays its 'little man against the system' premise by the numbers, sketching out the class dynamics of Carlyle and Dance's duel without ever rocking the boat too much. Halfway through, it manages to pull off a welcome change of gear as a certain young newspaper proprietor named Rupert Murdoch (Ben Mendelsohn) enters the fray and decides to turn the Stuart case into headline news. Caricaturing the media baron and his hold over the Australian population, Black And White looks like it's about to add an extra layer of meaning to its title - by taking pot-shots at the power of the press. Except it never really comes to anything. Carlyle jumps about like an over-excited schoolboy, Dance perfects his sneering-down-the-nose routine, and fall guy Ngoombujarra struggles through a thankless role as the film's chief patsy. It's To Kill A Mockingbird down under - solid and dependable, but hardly worth getting your didgeridoo in a twist over. Source: BBC Black and White (2002) Review by Anton Bitel In late 1958, in the remote town of Ceduna in South Australia, a nine year old white girl was brutally raped and bludgeoned to death in a beach cave. Shortly thereafter, in the presence of six local police officers, a full confession was signed by Max Stuart, an itinerant, alcoholic half-caste Aborigine, and his conviction and subsequent hanging for the crime seemed inevitable. Craig Lahiff's 'Black and White' is a powerful dramatisation of Stuart's ensuing trial and numerous appeals, in a case which divided a nation, and exposed for the first time the rotten foundations on which Australia's most important institutions were built. Assigned, along with his legal partner Helen Devaney (Kerry Fox), to defend Stuart (David Ngoombujarra), small-time Adelaide lawyer David O'Sullivan (Robert Carlyle) is convinced of his client's innocence, and accuses the Ceduna police of torture and coercion. Arguing the opposite case is the formidable South Australian Crown Prosecutor, Roderic Chamberlain (Charles Dance), but O'Sullivan soon learns that he is also pitted against the closed ranks of the constabulary, the judiciary, the State, and even the Catholic church, all as outraged that so much fuss should be made about the fate of a black man as they are desperate to stave off any undermining of their own authority. Under incredible pressure from the establishment, O'Sullivan refuses to back down from his career-ruining attempt to save Stuart from execution, receiving help from some unexpected quarters - a sympathetic priest (Colin Friels), a German academic (Petru Gheorgiu) and an ambitious young journalist by the name of Rupert Murdoch (Ben Mendelsohn). Films based closely on real events often lack the sort of drama that fills a big screen, but 'Black and White', with its cross-country dashes and eleventh hour reprieves, has as much excitement and tension as any work of blockbuster fiction. The screenplay by renowned Australian playwright Louis Nowra finds just the right balance between scenes inside and outside the courtroom, and deftly juggles an unusually large number of characters - there are seventy speaking parts - without ever seeming cluttered. To its infinite credit, 'Black and White' is in fact anything but. You will leave the cinema none the wiser as to whether Stuart was actually guilty or innocent of the crime. Both O'Sulivan's and Chamberlain's accounts of what happened are shown in equally vivid flashback, even though they are in direct contradiction, and even the final comments offered by the real Max Stuart himself, now an old man, are enigmatic and equivocal. The real point of the film, however, is not so much to show which side is right, but rather to expose the injustice of a system which continually put up barriers to prevent one side of the story being heard at all. As such, it is one of the finest, and indeed clearest, illustrations in celluloid of the insidious workings of what we now know as institutional racism - a difficult issue with relevance not just in Australian life in the 1950s, but here and now. It's Got: Excellent performances, especially from Charles Dance as the snobbish, driven Chamberlain, and Ben Mendelsohn as a young Rupert Murdoch getting his first taste of demagoguery. It Needs: A retrial. Alternatives: 'Cry Freedom', 'The Tracker' Summary: A true story about prejudice and old boys' networks, as engaging as it is important. 8/10 Source: Movie Gazette Black and White 9 January 2004 - This earnest and occasionally clunky drama recalls a real-life trial that exposed police corruption and a hotbed of endemic racism in South Australia. In December 1958 a young Aborigine Max Stuart (David Ngoombujarra) is arrested for the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl in the remote coastal town of Ceduna. A down-at-heel lawyer, David O'Sullivan (Robert Carlyle) is summoned to defend him against the establishment might of the Crown Prosecutor (Charles Dance, icily patrician) and a bitter conflict of retrials and recrimination begins. Craig Lahiff directs competently enough here, though the flashbacks are clumsily inserted and Louis Nowra's screenplay hits a few bum notes. You may also have to do a double-take at the appearance of one Rupert Murdoch (Ben Mendelsohn), the up-and-coming editor of the Adelaide News who stirs up a hornet's nest when he decides to throw his support behind O'Sullivan's campaign to securing a fair trial for Max Stuart. I dare say the movies will offer more surprises in the year ahead, but the idea of Rupert Murdoch as heroic crusader for truth and justice will certainly take some beating. Source: Independent (UK) A compelling true story 13 January, 2004 - Given that he figures so prominently in the outcome of this story, this film is bound to feature heavily on one of Rupert Murdoch's satellite channels. That may be more of a natural home in this country for a true story that, although compelling, doesn't have the same strong social resonance here that it did in its native Australia. In 1958, in a small town in South Australia, a nine-year-old girl was raped and murdered. The chief suspect was an aborigine drifter named Max Stuart who, on the basis of nothing more than a dubious confession, faces conviction and a death sentence. The trial is moved to Adelaide where his small-town lawyers - Robert Carlyle and Kerry Fox - are well out of their depth. Nonetheless, fired by a belief in their client's innocence, they are prepared to make appeal after appeal to spare him from execution. Their challenge to the establishment is not without its supporters. When the staid Adelaide Advertiser throws its weight behind a guilty verdict, the Adelaide News, owned by the young Rupert Murdoch, decides that it will campaign for Stuart's innocence. It would be unfair to reveal anything more other than the fact that the final outcome of the case had serious repercussions for the Australian legal system. Director Craig Lahiff says this film is a labour of love, a feeling that seems to extend to a cast of big names that also includes Colin Friels and Charles Dance. Each of them gives a performance shot through with integrity, decency, and a firm belief in the rightness of the story. When it comes to commitment, however, none of them can match David Ngoombujarra as Max Stuart, whose haunting performance will stay with you long after the credits have faded. Source: Evening Times (Scotland) Black and White Peter Bradshaw January 9, 2004 - Pundits have been fainting at the thought of a film that portrays Rupert Murdoch in a positive light. They needn't. This watchable fictionalisation of one of Australian history's most sensational criminal trials shows Murdoch as he was in the late-1950s before the cynicism set in: a brilliantly intuitive newspaperman who threw his energy behind a gutsy, barnstorming campaign to overturn the unsafe conviction of an Aboriginal man accused of raping and murdering a nine-year-old white girl. Robert Carlyle and Kelly Fox play the smalltown solicitors who draw the "short straw" ofdefending Max Stuart (David Ngoombujarra) in an era before legal aid. Charles Dance is the chilly, arrogant prosecutor, and Ben Mendelsohn is the young Murdoch, taking up Stuart's case as proprietor of the Adelaide News, the acorn from which his global media mega-oak was to grow. In many ways, the movie looks like a Terence Rattigan theatre piece with some stagey dialogue (particularly between Carlyle and Fox explaining the law to each other), stately courtroom scenes and after-dinner drawing room rows. Carlyle's plaintive cry of "Let right be done!" even recalls The Winslow Boy. But it's got an engrossing story to tell, and it's interestingly ambiguous where another sort of film might have been content with PC certainty. We are offered different views on what happened at the murder scene and in the police interrogation room - but no clear reassurances that Max is actually innocent. The charismatic Dance actually emerges as a man with no less principle than his opponent, and the same almost goes for Murdoch himself as he shakes up the stuffy quasi-Brit authorities before beating a thoughtful, strategic retreat. A dark horse of a film. Source: The Guardian Black and White Black and White is based on the true story of Max Stuart (David Ngoobujara) an Aboriginal man charged with the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl in the late 1950's. Local hack solicitors David O'Sullivan and Helen Devaney (Robert Carlyle and Kerry Fox) are his lawyers, but with the shocked community's reaction to the crime and the fact that Max is a drifter, high-flying Roderic Chamberlain (Charles Dance) finds it easy to get a guilty verdict. But O'Sullivan is not convinced; he is sure that the confession was written after Max had been beaten and threatened, but because they have no money to chase any leads or provide any more clues, it looks like Max is going to hang anyway. Then a young newspaper editor called Rupert Murdoch (Ben Mendesohn) enters the fray - he smells a good story and whips up a media frenzy about the Death Penalty and protests Max's innocence. Issues of race, colonialism and inner-country politics come into play as it becomes a race against time and prejudice to try and convince the High Court and then a Privy Council (the highest authority in the land) that Max is innocent. An interesting premise, Black and White is ultimately let down by a woefully structured, misdirected and leaden script. We're never quite clear what the story is, or whose story it is - is it O'Sullivan? Max? Murdoch? Chamberlain? Crucially, the characters don't really convince: our hero O'Sullivan (played well by Carlyle) seems to miss evidence and issues that seem obvious. Maybe that was true at the time, but surely a film would be more involving if it upped the ante and maybe ignored that in order to make the story more engaging. Also, Kerry Fox - a great actress - is utterly wasted and underused. She has no impact at all and when the pace did eventually pick up as Murdoch entered the story, you realised that was when the film should have started - not just seeing O'Sullivan learning nothing as time after time he blasts his mouth off in court and helps himself lose appeal after appeal. Ultimately, the case did bring about a change in Legal Aid, but it wasn't really due to O'Sullivan's investigative or court room efforts - it was a political decision based on media pressure - and that's how the story should have been angled. It's had critical praise on many levels it's an adequate, atmospheric and worthy story, but to me it's a wasted opportunity. It only occasionally veered out of TV movie territory and with this sort of cast involved, they should have done better than that. The fault lies at the door of the writer (Louis Nowra - who wrote the excellent Navigator some years ago but also bomb K19: Widow Maker) and the director. See the recent Rabbit-Proof Fence for a far superior look at Australia and its relationship with its Aboriginal ancestors. Source: Ain't It Cool News related links :
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