The Kid Stakes 1927 kids flick with goat race long version

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#Australian #silent #comedy #kids #family #goatrace • This channel has two copies of The Kid Stakes, one short, below the hour, and the other longer. This might seem perverse, but the music tracks are very different. • The short version has music typically associated with silent film comedies; the longer version has a more astringent piano accompaniment by Jan Preston. The images are better on the longer version, but some will prefer the music on the shorter version. • The shorter version used uncredited breezy ragtime and jazz-inflected music - it celebrated Fatty’s triumph at the end of the show with a song using lyrics from an old Maurice Chevalier tune, It's a great life if you don't weaken, You're a great guy if you won't weaken, If you don't lose heart, The hardest part is the first hundred years … and so on. • As for the film, it was a rare, lucky, charming find from the days when many silent Australian films were lost to nitrate decay. It was made by Tal Ordell - the man who played Dave in the original screen version of On Our Selection. • The idea for the film came from the popular 1920s comic strip character Fatty Finn, created by Syd Nicholls. In this film, Ordell directs his own six-year-old son Robin ‘Pop’ Ordell in the role of Fatty. • The Kid Stakes was filmed on location in the back streets of Woolloomooloo by Arthur Higgins, the renowned cinematographer of The Sentimental Bloke (1919),and of Fatty and his friends attempts to rescue and race Fatty’s pet goat Hector. • The goat race would later be revived in the 1980 talkie Fatty Finn, scripted by Bob Ellis and directed by Maurice Murphy. • The coverage of the climactic goat race is a mess - hardly surprising the way it was flung together in a day - but even in that rushed job, Arthur Higgins' cinematography is inventive and elsewhere something of a social realist delight. • Thanks to the small budget, Tal Ordell was forced to shoot in the streets, and as the kids race about doing their pratfalls, there's much to be seen of what were then the mean streets of inner Sydney, along with a state of the art urchin clothing. • This film remains a delight, energetic and prototypical of many subsequent Australian films that made kids shows child-centred. The adults are suitably incompetent, and crazy, from the cop to the elopers who let the goat fall out of their plane. • Here everything is genial, unlike the racist streak in films such as The Birth of White Australia. • There might be some joshing of the Italian who has his window broken, but he comes good with vital news. The Chinese market gardener, while he no savees , also plays a helpful role in evading the police. One of the kids (uncredited, but clearly not a WASP) is allowed an outrageous bowling action and a skilful capacity for dance. • Details: • Production company: Ordell-Coyle Productions • Budget: £4,000 • Locations: Sydney and Rockhampton. • Filmed: shooting took place around Woollomooloo and other Sydney areas in January 1927, and then director, cameraman and two key cast headed to Rockhampton to stage the climactic goat race (goat racing was prohibited in NSW). • Australian distributor: J. C. Williamson Films • Theatrical release: the film premiered at the Wintergarden in Brisbane on 9 June 1927, and thereafter toured the circuit, a rare privilege for a silent show aimed at kids. The film only ran from the Thursday to the Saturday on its initial Brisbane outing. • Video release: NFSA • Rating: the film wasn’t rated on initial release, there being no official rating system, but the much later NFSA release is rated G. • 35mm black and white 4:3 silent • Running time: 5,000 feet (Oxford*); Tal Ordell described it as a five reeler comedy in press reports. • Short version VHS time: 54’50” • Long version time: 73’23” • Box office: • The Oxford* recorded the contemporary response to the film: • “… although it was modestly profitable, the press and the trade tended to dismiss it as a children’s film. Following its initial release, it was cut to form comedy shorts, and the goat race was sent abroad in news magazines. • Awards: None known, but in 1995 when the biggest Australian film exhibition ever to screen in the US opened in October 1995 at MOMA in NY Larry Kardish, American curator of Strictly Oz: A History of Australian Film, chose to launch the exhibition of some 100 Australian films by showing his invited guests The Kid Stakes. • “I decided to show that rather than something like Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke because I think anyone who knows anything about the history of Australian cinema, or world cinema, would already know who Longford is, whereas cinema audiences here have no idea about The Kid Stakes, which is a marvellous film.” (The Canberra Times 30th October 1995) • And so a Rockhampton goat race won, by a short beard. It’s not an award, but it’ll do, goat, it’ll do. • Pike, Andrew and Cooper, Ross, Oxford Australian Film 1900-1977, OUP, revised edition 1998

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