Click on FULL SCREEN, then sit back and enjoy
I love Australian movies and "The Delinquents" is very much an Australian movie. It depicts the conservative Australia of the 1950s with historically correct recreations of the looks and stifling conventions in places like Melbourne, Brisbane and Bundaberg.
Add into the soundtrack songs like 'Only You', 'Since I Met You Baby', 'She's My Baby', 'Great Balls of Fire', and 'Lucille', and I feel as if I had just walked off the ship in 1965 and into the Australia I'd come to love, where men wore hats to drive and everybody thanked the bus driver.
Based on the book by Criena Rohan, a name nearly forgotten in the annals of Australian literature and a nom-de-plume for Deirdre Cash, who grew up in a down-on-their-luck Irish-Australian family, had two marriages (the first, in the late 1940s, precipitated by a teenage pregnancy) and two children (one from each) before being diagnosed with cancer in her mid-thirties. Rohan managed to churn out two novels - the second was "Down by the Dockside" - before succumbing to the cancer at age 38. Two novels and gone at 38 is not a recipe for fully-evolved writing, and her novels are far from perfect but provide great critical social realism of the post-war period. Read a preview here.
Yes, it might seem slow, mushy and only for romantics, and feel like something of a backstreet-Tristan and Isolde, but it shows us an Australia that we still cherish and remember. It's a must-see movie!
Googlemap Riverbend
