Three to Go

This one is a curious pivot point for Australian film, made by the old fashioned Commonwealth Film Unit, until TV the major source of employment in film in the country, unsteadily attempting to accommodate the demands for a local feature film industry as the Canadian NFB had done a few years earlier.

Desperate to appear hip and in touch with a young Audience THREE TO GO centers on young Australians - a boy from an affluent home, a Greek- Australian girl and a young woman outgrowing her country community.

No Vietnam War here. Revolt is taking a sickie and going to the beach with Graham Bond - who does register. The grainy, available light black and white of the then recent New Wave records the texture of an already doomed, naive and, to some, unspoiled Australia about to be confronted with a world it could no longer ignore.

Weir, of course, pulled away from the pack at this point. Judy Morris and Bond burned brightly for a little while.

This early black-and-white film of the Australian New Wave functions better as a documentary of life for young people in 1970 than as a coherent narrative.

It is most notable for containing the debut segment by Peter Weir who later played an important part in Australian Cinema's 1970s renaissance. His segment 'Michael' looks at a young man dabbling in the politics of the time.

The other segments 'Judy' which looks at a young woman in Tamworth who dreams of going to the city, and 'Toula' which looks at a young Greek girl trying to meet a boy despite the watchful gaze of her restrictive family, both show situations faced by many in Australian society at the time.

Of the cast, only Judy Morris and Serge Lazareff had moderately successful acting careers, though Grahame Bond went on to make some landmark TV comedy and Joe Hasham later starred in Number 96 as the first openly gay character on Oz TV.

So this is an interesting artefact, even if it does look more like a TV documentary than a feature film.