Sentimental Bloke, The (ATOM Study Guide)

This study guide discusses how secondary and tertiary teachers of English, Film Studies and Media Studies might use the restored version of The Sentimental Bloke (Raymond Longford, 1919) and the resources from the accompanying box set produced by the National Film and Sound Archive.

A comedy, a romance, a ripping good yarn – that's The Sentimental Bloke, one of Australia's iconic early silent films. The Sentimental Bloke broke all box-office records in Australia and New Zealand when it was released in 1919, with people queuing along city blocks to see it. However, it did not succeed in the United States, where test audiences failed to understand the Australian street vernacular of the time. The National Film and Sound Archive recently produced Raymond Longford's The Sentimental Bloke: The Restored Version, a DVD box set that includes the restored film and a host of reference materials.

The film is based on Australian C.J. Dennis' 1915 book The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke. The book was the first of Dennis' 'verse novels' and introduced Bill (the Sentimental Bloke), his wife, Doreen, and his friend Ginger Mick. Wildly popular, the book sold more than 60,000 copies in the eighteen months following its publication in 1915. Dennis appears to have produced somewhere in the vicinity of 4000 pieces of prose and poetry during his forty or so years as a writer.

The film has a classic narrative structure, with strong and engaging characters, wit and charm. This is particularly evident in the intertitles, which use Dennis' colourful verse. The Sentimental Bloke raises important questions about gender, class, language and our national identity. Most importantly, it marries humour and a love story, and it is warmly told with a great deal of empathy for its characters and their tribulations and triumphs.

Students may find Dennis' verse difficult to decode in the intertitles, but reading sections from The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke should help them to enjoy the language. (The book is readily available to order online and in bookstores.) The monograph included with the box set of the DVD includes the intertitles and their standard English translations.

Some words that were in common usage amongst the working class in 1919 are now unacceptable, such as 'nigger' and 'tart', but they can provide an excellent starting point for a discussion on how language evolves and societal values change.

The NFSA's box set also provides us with many other resources to explore history and the history of Australian film. It is important to remember that Australia has a proud film heritage. About 250 silent feature films were made in Australia between 1906 and 1930. Less than fifty have survived in whole or in part, and today Australians treasure them as part of our cultural heritage.

The Sentimental Bloke was rediscovered in the 1950s and a new print screened at the Sydney Film Festival in 1955. Since then, the original negative sent to the US has been discovered and found to be of a better quality than any of the Australian copies. The new version premiered at the 2004 Sydney Film Festival and screened at the 2005 London Film Festival. A full description of the restoration of the film is provided in the monograph.