POWER WITHOUT GLORY (1976)

THE FILM (Mini Series)

DIRECTOR: Douglas Sharp, Keith Wilkes, David Zweck, Oscar Whitbread, John Gauci, Michael Ludbrook

SCREENWRITER: Howard Griffiths, Cliff Green, Sonia Borg, Roger Simpson, Tom Hegarty, John Marti

STARS: Martin Vaughan, Rosalind Speirs, John Wood, Heather Canning, Terence Donovan, Wendy Hughes, George Mallaby, Michael Pate, Rowena Wallace, Tony Bonner, Gerard Kennedy, Graeme Blundell, Gus Mercurio, John Hargreaves

COUNTRY: Australia

THIS BOOK

AUTHOR: Frank Hardy

TYPE: Novel

PUBLISHER: Angus & Robertson

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1982

COUNTRY: Australia

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1950

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title

NOTES

GENRE: Political drama

WORDS: I recall the Made for TV mini series in Australia as a kid. It was quite the event, though I remember little about it. It was extremely popular. That I recall.

Australian television mini-series of the 1970s (this one made of twenty-six 50 minute episodes!) tended to be lavish (at least by Australian standards). They all look pretty clunky today but not without their charm … most (including this one) were filmed on location rather than on sets (no money for extravagant sets).

Hardy’s famous (famous in Australia) novel, I’m sad to say, I haven’t read, though I’ve owned it since 1986! It would have been right up my alley at one time … a cross between John T. Farrell and John O’Hara though written by someone on the left.  Its central character, a working class Catholic boy from Melbourne, becomes a gambler, bookmaker, businessman  and then a powerbroker in the Australian Labor Party.

It’s a Roman à clef (a novel in which many of the characters correlate with real-life figures of the time). Here, very closely.  The Australian Communist Party (ACP) had apparently funded Hardy (a member of the party) to write the book, because they wanted to expose corruption in politics without having to name real names and be liable in front of the courts. This fit with Hardy’s writing philosophy … he was a member of the Realist Writers Group, an Australian-wide organization of writers who believed that the function of literature was to change society. Despite the changing of names Hardy was sued by the wife of Australian political figure John Wren, who the book was ostensibly based on. Her character in the book has an affair and an illegitimate child. The case was dismissed when Hardy argued successfully that the title character was based on more than one person, and so, the wife’s character is a composite also.