Cinematic ascendancy confirmed

FRANCE, GERMANY, Italy, Japan, Greece, Spain, India, even England for a time, and always America, the various countries and cultures have taken turns to dominate the growing art of moving pictures. Today, after several hopeful starts Australian cinema is positively in the ascendant.
Individual Australian movic! have shone in a range ol different styles: the Australiar Western, the topical Newsfront, the range of glorious landscape the sensible. natural feminism of My Brillant Career or ThE Getting of Wisdom. the humane tolerance of Manganinnie ot Peter Weir's treatment of the aborigines in The Last Wave, and Gallipoli. All these, except the last, are now integrated in one marvellous Australian movie, We of the Never, Never ("U", Screen on the Hill, Odeon, Kensington) from the autobiographical story by Jeannie Gunn which has become an Australian classic.
The film based on it by screenwriter Peter Schreck and director Igor Auzins tells the fundamentally simple story of a bride (Angela Punch McGregor) who at the beginning of the century intrepidly accompanies her husband (Arthur Dignam) across the continent to the Northern Territory where he is to be the manager of a cattle station; the gradual triumph of her discreet determination to counter the resentment of the all-male community; and the exercise of natural human sympathy and intelligent resource to make friends with the aborigines or displaying the authority where needed to cope with the Chinese cooks, venial and refractory or genial and benign.
The thrilling wide landscapes are the first exhiliration: desert or pasture or occasional familiar leafy trees, and the round-ups of galloping wild horses are as stirring pioneer adventure as the earliest great Westerns; the view of human relations between races, classes, generations and between husband and wife is inspiring.
I am reluctant to spoil any of the film's lovely moments of surprise by recounting it in detail. But the photography by the late Gary Hansen is superb, the playing suggests we are watching not pictures or actors but people living and growing. One close-up of the leading aboriginal known as "Goggle
eye" (Donald Blitner) is a truly memorable shot. I can't remember when a film had last made me cry. We of the Never Never left both me and a young man in the party, 21 years old and six feet tall, weeping, though it is a profoundly happy and satisfying movie.
Robert Altman is without doubt one of the most brilliant practising American filmmakers, but his choice of Edward Graczyk's play Come Back to the .5 and Dime. Jimmy
Dean, Jimmy Dean ("18", Lumiere) seems unrewarding. The scene is the reunion of members of a Jimmy Dean fan club twenty years after the car crash which killed the promising young star they idolised.
Half a dozen girls, now twenty years older but not much wiser, gather in a Texan soda fountain to exchange dreams and memories in voices painful to English ears.
Nothing very much happens, nor do we learn much about the hysterical fans or about James Dean. One fan (Sandy Dennis) imagines her son was fathered by Dean, while she was an extra in the film Giant and photographed just behind Elizabeth Taylor's ear. The only fairly normal-seeming one of the company (the excellent Karen Black) is treated as a freak because she has apparently had a sex-change operation.
Technically the design and treatment are brilliant, as expected of Altman. But the play does not seem to warrant his trouble and talent or those of such good actresses as Karen Black or Sandy Dennis.
Forbidden Relations ("18", Gate Bloomsbury) is a strange slow Hungarian film about a half-brother and half-sister who fall in love. The film is neither edifying nor entertaining, but makes clear that in this presumably communist society incest is illegal as well as immoral, but that gaolers and warders habitually try to temper the strict rules with leniency for the sinners.