The Sundowners

Most of us find a comfort in knowing that at the end of the day we have a place we can call home, a familiar respite that we can go to to lay our heads down and relax. Not everyone is like that, though, and some people out there have a nomadic streak to them where they feel like they need to always be on the move. In the old days, these people were referred to as sundowners because they lived in tents and were gone with the sun. 

Jon Cleary’s 1952 novel, The Sundowners, became the basis for this 1960s film. This happened by way of an accident when the Australian-born Dorothy Hammerstein, second wife of Oscar Hammerstein II, intended to send a copy of a different novel, The Shiralee, to director Fred Zinnemann. Instead, she accidentally sent him a copy of The Sundowners. He read it and immediately bought the film rights with the intent of producing the film himself. 

Gary Cooper was pursued for the leading role that ultimately went to Robert Mitchum once Cooper’s health prevented him from being in the film. Mitchum, for his part, acquiesced to his usual top billing in favor of Deborah Kerr, whom he greatly admired and wanted to work with. He joked at the time that they could “design a 24-foot sign of me bowing to her if you like”. That admiration and good-natured respect show through on the screen whenever the two share the frame. It helps sell the two as a married couple who have a long history of love and respect together. 

Despite Jack Warner wanting to film the movie entirely in Arizona and Texas, Fred Zinnemann insisted that it needed to be shot on location in Australia. You can replicate the desert, but you cannot replicate the feel of the outback, and he understood this. It added quite a bit to the budget of the film, but the film didn’t suffer from this. People came to see it to the tune of $3.8 million, and the film was critically and commercially lauded at the time. It made waves during the awards season, too, securing several Academy Award nominations, a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Deborah Kerr, and was ranked high on many critics’ lists of the best films of 1960. To date, it is considered among the best films that lost the Best Picture race at the Oscars.

This meat pie western is a story about Paddy Carmody (Robert Mitchum), a sheep drover and shearer who travels the sparsely populated outback for work along with his wife Ida (Deborah Kerr) and son Sean (Michael Anderson Jr.). Ida dreams of a day when the family settles down and she can have a real home instead of living out of a tent, but Paddy is always restless, unwilling to be saddled down to one place. She saves their money, though, with the intent of one day putting up a down payment on a home of her own. 

While passing through the bush, the family meets refined Englishman Rupert Venneker (Peter Ustinov) and hires him to help drive a large herd of sheep to the town of Cawndilla. Though the way is dangerous and they face a large bushfire at one point, they eventually make it to Cawndilla intact. There, Rupert takes a liking to Mrs. Firth (Glynis Johns), the local pub owner, but even though she likes him back, he doesn’t want to be tied down, either. 

Ida convinces Paddy to take a job in town shearing sheep while she finds work serving as a cook for the men and Sean as a tar boy. This allows her the time to make friends, including Jean Halstead (Dina Merrill), the lonely wife of their employer. She also helps a woman, the wife of one of the workers, when she arrives in town unannounced and pregnant, through her first birth. All this time, Ida is saving their earnings because she wants to buy a place in town that they stayed at when they first arrived. But Paddy has the wanderlust and is getting restless. 

The twists this film takes in the second half are surprisingly unexpected. This really is a story about a family that has very different goals in life from each other, yet the love and respect are still there. This could have easily been an examination of a marriage crumbling in the face of selfishness, but instead, when it seems like no one will get their wishes, they come together for each other. Through Paddy’s actions, and a bit of bad luck, all of Ida’s plans and desires are lost in a matter of hours. Yet you can tell that Paddy, despite not wanting to be tied down to one place, is sorrowful over what has happened and tries his best to make amends and get his wife what she really wants. This is a testament to just how much he loves her and is willing to sacrifice for her. 

And she is equally understanding of him. They have been together for a very long time, and she understands him, too. When his self-destructive actions lose all the money that she has been saving for a home, she could have rightfully pointed the finger of blame at him. But what good would that have done? The money is gone, and starting a fight wouldn’t change that. Instead, though she is clearly upset and in tears over the loss, she also sees that he is truly remorseful and willing to give up something he really values to try and get her the money back. 

The ending of the film is reminiscent of the ending of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, where the characters spend the whole film working hard toward a goal only to lose it all to bad luck. Their response is along the same lines, too, laughing at how fickle fate can be because getting bitter and angry will solve nothing. It’s an open ending, too, that may not satisfy all viewers but is very true to real life. After all, life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. 

This is a wonderful little western that really showcases the Australian outback and the people that make it their home. But even more importantly, it gives us a family that takes for better or worse seriously and loves each other even when things get so frustrating you could forgive them if they turned on each other. We rarely see this level of understanding between such different people in a film. It’s refreshing and beautiful to see. Mitchum and Kerr are absolutely believable as a couple who love each other despite their differences. Ustinov and Johns are a cute couple, too, and their scenes are a pure delight. The Sundowners may not end the way you think it should, but it still will leave a smile on your face knowing that this family will be alright, even if they didn’t quite get what we all wanted them to get in the end. 

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Motion Picture: Fred Zinnemann

Best Directing: Fred Zinnemann

Best Actress: Deborah Kerr

Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Glynis Johns

Best Writing - Based on Material from Another Medium: Isobel Lennart

____________________________________________________

Release Date: December 9, 1960

Running Time: 133 minutes

Not Rated

Starring: Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum, and Peter Ustinov

Directed by: Fred Zinnemann