The Sentimental Bloke (1919) User Reviews

Australia's Earliest Successful International Film

[springfieldrental · 7/10 · 27 September 2021]

The Australian film industry, one of early cinema's most vibrant country for movie productions, was slowly diminishing after 1912 because of business consolidations in studio and distribution companies. By the mid-1920's, 94% of all films shown in Australia were American-made.

But one movie released in Oct. 1919, "The Sentimental Bloke," gave hope to Australia's big screen model. The feature film was a huge success not only in Down Under but in New Zealand as well as in the United Kingdom. The main ingredient for success was its natural portrayal of Australia's working class members, a populace movie audiences around the English speaking world related to.

"The Sentimental Bloke," based on the hugely popular 1915 verse novel 'The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke,' by C. J. Dennis, has its title cards within the movie containing verses taken directly from Dennis' work. Critics agree "The Sentimental Bloke" is Australia's best silent movie and one of the finest motion pictures to be produced Down Under.

Its storyline is fairly simple: a scruffy laborer (played by Arthur Tauchert, himself a manual worker before becoming a vaudeville comedian in the early 1900's) is jailed for illegal gambling, and meets a female pickle factory worker once released. The movie traces their up and down relationship. She reprimands him for his drinking episodes with his mates at the same time a more sophisticated man has his sights on her. The circumstances of the normal working class romance tickles the hearts of even the most jaded viewers, illustrating how movies can cause an upwelling of emotions to those who can relate to its characters.

What makes "The Sentimental Bloke" even more remarkable today is its city scenes were shot in the dock neighborhood of Woolloomooloo, Sydney, Australia, a rough working class area during the early 1900's. The close proximity to the ocean has recently gentrified the district to become a highly desirable place to live.

A sequel, "Ginger Mick," was produced in 1920 as well as a 1932 talkie remake. But none achieved the look or status of the 1919 original. Like many thought-lost silent movies that were recently discovered, "The Sentimental Bloke" was found by shear luck in the cubbyholes of the George Eastman House archives in 1973 and fully restored.

Seattle International Film Festival, David Jeffers for SIFFblog.com

[rdjeffers · 3 June 2007]

Saturday June 2, 7:00pm , SIFF Cinema (The Nesholm Family Lecture Hall), Seattle

Saturday June 16, 4:00pm, ACMI Cinemas, Melbourne

" I nudge Doreen. She whispers, "Ain't it grand!" 'Er eyes is shinin', an' I squeeze 'er 'and."

The earthy, humorous poems of C. J. Dennis' roughneck "larrikin" Bill, first appeared as installments in The Sydney Bulletin. After a stint in jail, Bill grows weary of his drinking and gambling ways, "All them joys o' life I 'eld so sweet is up the pole." Published in 1915 as The Songs of A Sentimental Bloke, thousands of hardbound pocketbook copies entertained homesick AIF (Australian Imperial Forces) infantrymen in European trenches during The Great War.

Raymond Longford purchased the rights from Dennis and the film, starring Lottie Lyell as the "bit 'o fluff" who reforms Bill, was a solid hit in Australia and New Zealand. "I knoo she weren't no ordinary tart." An attempt was made to modify the original verse used in the intertitles for an American release. The sweetness and appeal of Dennis original slang was lost, and the story of Bill and his "bonzer peach" Doreen, the pickle factory girl, failed in the U.S. market. Ironically, as subsequent restorations have improved the quality of the film, the best surviving source, an original 35mm negative, was discovered in the archives of GEH (George Eastman House) with the rewritten titles.

Observations pointing out inferior production values in this film ignore the superior quality of the composition and the historic provenance of the locations. While, Australian film had not reached the technical levels of Hollywood lighting and camera movement, the overall content more than overcomes these minor deficiencies. In more than one instance, actors within the open interior sets are struck by direct sunlight, something seen in French and American films years earlier. The visual narrative, use of frequent close-ups and subtle, naturalistic acting, is equal to many American films from the same period. Longford's use of natural light in outdoor scenes, superimposed and reflected images are in fact, quite advanced.

If the context in which this film was originally viewed is considered (the conclusion of a war where thousands of Australian boys perished half-way around the world, and the profoundly demoralizing effect this had at home), The Sentimental Bloke must have been a welcome tonic. An utterly charming masterpiece, this greatest survivor of Australian silent film deserves the broadest global audience.

More poem than film

[thinbeach · 1/10 · 31 December 2015]

'The Sentimental Bloke' is an Australian silent, but for the vernacular of the title cards you wouldn't know it. The Bloke - a former crook going straight - falls for a girl, and there follows a romance with its ups and downs, set in the modest locations of an early urban city.

The biggest problem with the film is how reliant it is upon title cards to dictate the story. Based on poetry, it feels we get almost one title card per image, and thus it is more like a picture book than a film. Adding to the issue is that the images don't add to, or have nearly as much character, as the lowbrow rhyming slang, which is not without a kind of working class charm. So if you were interested in that kind of thing, and don't watch movies to read, I'd just seek out the poetry.

Sentimental Early Australian Silent

[sunlily · 8/10 · 15 January 2007]

It was a treat to watch this Australian silent, A Sentimental Bloke, with Lottie Lyell, who was called Australia's first movie star. An adaptation of the popular poem by Australian poet C.J. Dennis, the film was humorous and homey. It tells the tale of a ordinary "bloke" whose life is transformed by love. The Australian slang in the title cards made them a real challenge to read, but the acting style is so natural that it's not hard to understand what's going on. Arthur Tauchert, as the bloke, brings just the right amount of roughness and pathos to the part as he undergoes his transformation, and Lottie Lyell as Doreen, just the right amount of working girl toughness and maidenly sweetness. You can tell that she was ill during the shooting of the movie, and she died young of tuberculosis, bringing to an end a fine collaboration with film maker Raymond Longford.

An endearing adaptation of C.J. Dennis' poems

[barry-28 · 9/10 · 20 September 1998]

This movie is one of the classics of the early Australian film industry. An adaptation of "Songs of a Sentimental Bloke" by poet C.J. Dennis, the film tells the story of the romance between "The Bloke" and his lady love, Doreen.

By way of explanation....

[Mandyjam · 10/10 · 15 February 2006]

In 1915 C.J.Dennis published a collection of poems telling the story of "The Sentimental Bloke". The poems are spoken by the Bloke himself, telling of his meeting with the girl who wins his heart, his courtship and marriage.

This black and white movie of the silent era captures the spirit of the poetry exactly. Near the beginning are the memorable words-

"The World 'as got me snouted, jist a treat! Cruel Forchin's dirty left 'as smote me soul, And all them Joys o' Life I 'eld so sweet Is up tha pole!

We soon have our Hero proclaiming-

'Er name's Doreen! Well, spare me bloomin' days! You could've knocked me down wiv 'alf a brick!

My only negative comment about this movie is that the written dialogue is not always easy to understand. It would be good to have the words dubbed.

The Spirit of "Den" is Not Dead

[proword · 9/10 · 18 February 2005]

After waiting many months, I saw the restored version of "The Sentimental Bloke" for the first time at the Perth International Arts Festival last night. Worth it? My oath. "I dips me lid" to the blokes and tarts wot worked on this "Aussie Icon". The story of the restoration is a tale in itself - the only existing prints were "not the best" and through a "mislabelling" it turned out that an almost pristine copy had been filed in a United States film archive as "The Sentimental Blonde", and was apparently an original negative. I'll let the reader research this story further.

C.J. Dennis ("Den") is one of Australia's best loved poets, and "(Songs of) The Sentimenal Bloke" one of his most enduring and endearing collections of the Australian Idiom ever published. (Apparently the US version of the film had "American" inter titles - WHAT the Americans would have made of it is thoroughly beyond me. I think if would have come out as completely foreign language).

In brief, this film traces the life of "The Kid" or "Bill" in his transition from street tough (read gang member) to husband to "Doreen" (his "bit of fluff") and loving father, but done with humour and tear jerking sentiment - as it should be. Schmaltz with a capital "S".

Highlight of the movie for me was a fairly thorough airing of one of Den's most popular poems, "The Play", which describes how Bill and Doreen go to see "Romeo and Juliet"

• "The drama's writ be Shakespeare, many years ago, About a barmy goat called Romeo".

Romeo -

" .... wiv a yell, plunks Tyball through the gizzard wiv 'is sword,

'Ow I ongcored!

"Put in the boot!" I sez. "Put in the boot!"

"Ush!" sez Doreen ... "Shame! sez some silly coot."

As a bonus, the performance I attended had a live three piece "bush band" ("The Larrikins") playing a musical accompaniment, specially composed for the event.

I was slightly confused at first, since the original poem was set in Melbourne, but the film was shot in Sydney, and I found myself looking at Central Railways Station when I should have been looking at Flinders Street station. Artistic licence.

Considering the prodigious output of "Den's" pen, the movie could only skim the surface, but this was sufficient for me to be able look and see "Bill" and "Doreen" (not to mention his best cobber "Ginger Mick") made flesh and blood with a lashing of the original humour and pathos.

Whilst the film characters did not follow Hal Gye's original illustrations very closely (a wise move since Gye's little "Cherubs" all appeared "sans culottes") I had no trouble recognising them.

I think "Den" would'a been proud of it fit to bust his vest.

This is what I call 'simply the best'

[tunneatjc · 9/10 · 22 March 2005]

The Sentimental Bloke, to myself, is difficult to understand in terms of the inter titles. However, I can easily follow the movie and know what it want to communicate with audiences. In this movie, I can feel great sense of love. By this I mean I can see between somethings I would like to call 'Good' and 'Evil' sides of the Bloke fighting during the movie. The Bloke uses 'love,' as I already mentioned, as a weapon of the 'Good' to fight his 'Evil.' For example, when he met Doreen he decided to be a good husband and it appears again when he had a baby. As I can feel from this movie, the power of love no matter who you love, it is a great weapon to fight everything and to overcome any problems you may face.

How does this film stand up to compariosn with the other films of its day?

[kekseksa · 23 October 2015]

It does not do, in my view, to worship at he altar of conventional cinema historiography (grossly US-centred for the most part. Nor should one imagine something magical in a litany of names (D. W. Griffith, Maurice Tourneur, Victor Sjöström) simply because of the "canonical" view that these film-makers are "auteurs", a fatuous (and largely meaningless) term that means undue attention is based even to the poor films made by such directors at the expense of rather good films by directors who have not been awarded the same (entirely spurious) title or whose films do not fit neatly into the "standard" (again, largely US-centred) view of cinema history. Longford's. The Sentimental Bloke is quite evidently fated to be too often a casualty of both these typical critical prejudices.

Free oneself from these notions and one can see without difficulty that The Sentimental Bloke has many virtues lacking in the great majority of films of the period (those of Griffith, Tourneur and even to some extent of Sjöström quite as much as those by the many, many lesser lights.

1) First, very simply, it is a quite different sort of film from most of its contemporaries and stands out by virtue of its very individual character. It is not the only film by any means to have been made from a poem; this was quite common practice especially in the early years of cinema, but it tended to be a rather weak genre because of the thinness of the material. The Sentimental Bloke is far and away the best of the bunch (which include several very mediocre Griffith films and Sjöström's rather laborious Terje Vigen, based on an Ibsen poem, which came out just two years before this). A more striking difference still, is that, despite the ironic title,it is almost completely lacking in the kind of sentimentality and melodrama that tends to be the bane of films of this period. Compared for instance with Tourneur's Pride of the Clan (a very run-of-the-mill Pickford melodrama of 1917) or Griffith's rather maudlin Broken Blossoms, which came out in the same year, this Australian film really has a freshness and zing, even a certain pleasing cynicism, to it that those other films cannot boast. Not to mention the nauseatingly sentimental Griffith films A Romance of Happy Valley and Trueheart Susie, which both came out in 1919, or the dire series of war-propaganda films that Griffith and Pickford both turned out in 1918-1919. Or indeed DeMille's rather bizarre 1919 version of the James Barrie play, The Admirable Crichton (Male and Female). Whatever the US' technical advantages (overstated when compared with the far superior German film industry of the time),it compensated for negatively, then as now, by sheer bad taste in terms of content.

2. A second very strong plus of this film, despite its light-hearted nature, is its naturalism, not just in the acting style but more importantly in its subject-matter (the everyday lives of ordinary folk( and in its very effective location-shooting. Naturalism, then as now, was almost unknown in US film although it would come during the twenties to have a strong place in European film. It is quite interesting to note that both this Australian film and the equally marginalised Back to God's Country by Canadian director Nell Shipman (also 1919) in neither case slavishly follow US lines, as one might have expected them to do, but both have a much less restrictive style, with plenty of depth and context to the cinematography more typical of contemporary European films (compare for instance the relatively claustrophobic studio-bound feel,despite its colonial setting, of Tourneur's Victory in this same year, one of his most conventional, US-style films).

3. The film, like the poem, bristles with a fine self-deprecating irony. To treat its characters and their apparent behaviour at first degree (when everything about the film is clearly at second degree) is to totally misread it. Yes, there is a quite deliberate degree of "stereotyping" but these stereotypes are continually being ridiculed and undermined throughout the film. The poem is quite the opposite of vulgar outback-horseplay; it is a very sophisticated and witty piece of work that turns everything Australian inside-out. And I think the film does a very good job of conveying that. And the manner in which it faithfully reflects the rhythm of the original (and this is a vital but generally neglected aspect of filming a poem) is really most unusual and very remarkable. De Grasse's US film The Old Swimmin' Hole of 1921 attempts something similar but is not nearly such a good film.

Most people have described the film's "charm" and it i impossible to avoid the word when talking about it. It is immensely charming and stands out immediately from any list of the plays of the year precisely because it is so different from the others. And yet it was a strong year for film. Less so perhaps in the increasingly convention-bound US; the best US film of the year by quite a margin is Von Stroheim's Blind Husbands; European films, on the other hand, are much more varied and powerful (Lubitsch' Madame DuBarry, Gance's J'Accuse, Dreyer's Praesidenten, Holger-Madsen's Mod Lyset, Oswald's Anders als die Andern, Lang's Hara Kiri - a list to which one could go on adding). Even so this Australian film has a great deal to recommend it. It remains one of the most distinctive films of the year and, while this may be something of a sideways compliment, it remains quite the best Australian film I have personally ever seen.

Still entertaining 100 years later!

[PeterM27 · 8/10 · 18 December 2021]

This film is reputed to have been the best of Australia's hundreds of silent films made between 1906 and 1930.

It is one of the few to survive intact, and the photography is clean and beautifully framed. The acting is naturalistic, the characters engaging, and the 'dialogue' (intertitles), in Australian slang of the period, is hilarious, being taken from the popular 1915 poem The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke by C. J. Dennis.

Arthur Tauchert is fabulous as the 'rough diamond' Bill and Australia's darling Lottie Lyell is good too. It's wonderful to see Sydney as it was in 1919, with all the horses and old suits, hats, dresses and olde worlde accoutriments.

This is a film that can still entertain after 100 years.

The most charming and successful collaboration between Raymond Longford and Lottie Lyell, with Arthur Tauchert as a very natural bloke, and Lyell, touching as his girl.giving a very natural

[BOUF · 19 March 2000]

This is the masterpiece of collaborators, Raymond Longford and Lottie Lyell, who treat the source material - CJ Dennis's delightful verse narrative - with humanity and restraint. Realistically set in Sydney's Woolloomoolloo district, Vaudeville veteran Arthur Tauchert (very natural and instinctive) stars as the bloke, a barrowman, who's saved from his "larrikin" ways by the love of a good woman (Lyell, whose performance is subtle and touching). An unusual gem.

The Sentimental Bloke a minor masterpiece

[greg-schofield · 8/10 · 16 March 2008]

Mozjoukine reviews this fine film and downs it for its stereotypes, uninspired settings. I believe they have missed the point and failed to enjoy a sophisticated story well rendered to the screen.

It is significant that this film transposes a well known and much loved novel-in-verse into a silent film that remains faithful to its origins. I suggest anyone viewing this film should first read C.J. Dennis' fourteen part poem. I would recommend looking it up on the net -- best read by speaking it aloud.

The characters of The Bloke, Doreen, Ginger and the rest of the cast are portrayed with a good deal of subtlety and the nature of the story makes for understatement. The idea of shooting on the streets of Woolloomooloo was fitting and the inter-titles (resting on the poem itself) capture the cadence of Australian colloquial expressions, echoes of which can still be heard today.

The big bloke, a drinker and gambler, a petty crook, is at heart a lamb. A type easily recognized today, and still very much alive.

Australia was once known as a workingman's paradise C.J. Dennis' poem was extremely popular because so many working people could see themselves in its words and imagines. The film had an extremely hard task in capturing this on silver-nitrate, but its success as a film showed how well it did that at the time.

Being as tough as nails and as soft as marshmallow at the same time, is part of the national character, but to see this you have to leave the middle class prissy suburbs and walk rubbing shoulders with ordinary working folks. There the truth captured in the film can be seen reflected still, though somewhat faded and far less robustly than it once was.

The bloke is a real character and the film itself a treasure of understated charm.

Lumpen comedy has become the classic Australian silent movie.

[Mozjoukine · 16 June 2004]

The main line of Australian film making runs from this on through the Dad & Dave comedies (Ray Longford did some silent) Barry MacKenzie and Crocodile Dundee. While the later ones are a subject of embarrassment to the Australian film establishment, who nurture the fantasy of melding Political Correctness with CULTURE, this has been granfathered into an object of reverence.

It may have been a massive task for Ray Longford and his colleagues to get this far in 1919 Australia and maybe it's uncharitable to point out the limitations of their achievement but a film that traded these in comic stereotypes (endearing yokels, a thick ear working class hero who offers to duff up his rival for the beret wearing object of his affections and advises Romeo to "Put in the boot!" ) from any other source would be savaged. The acting is unshaded, the staging small scale and the coverage uninspired - mainly three quarter length two shots in uninteresting locations. The leads are not placed in the wider action which occurs as scene setting.

Poor Arthur Higgins does his best, imposing the close up of Lyall on the cut pumpkin and processing a moon into the beach sky but the film remains drab and stereotypical.

No one seems worried that THE SENTIMENTAL BLOKE is the contemporary of the work of Griffith, Tourneur and Sjöstrom when making extravagant claims for it. It's crude rendition of the Australian character continues - maybe he got it right - but shouldn't that worry someone?

The current, occasionally sharp restoration doesn't change these facts.