Two men, both called Frank Thring, left their particular stamps on Australian theatrical and film industries. The father (1882–1936) was a self-made entrepreneur who married a waxworks heiress; ran silent-film shows in rural Tasmania; bought, built or managed theatres; and created almost single-handedly Australia's first talking-picture industry. His son (1926–1994) was in every sense larger than life: born into privilege as the black prince of Toorak (in Melbourne the address matters), he became for many decades the reigning queen of Australian theatre.
The older Frank built material and entrepreneurial structures such as his Hoyts distribution chain and lavish capital-city Regent ciné-variété palaces. His immediate rival was Stuart Doyle's Sydney-based Cinesound empire, with its own magnificent chain of State Theatres. In the early 1930s Thring produced two original commercial musicals, Collitts’ Inn and The Cedar Tree: this at a time when rival theatrical entrepreneurs staunchly refused to back local creativity and the New Wave was yet forty years in the future. Efftee Films preserves the work of, amongst others, the brilliant vaudeville and revue comics George Wallace and Pat Hanna. Young Frank, known as the ‘Thring Thing’ and both originator and subject of endless scandalous anecdotes, lent his flamboyant and studiously wicked authority to a series of star roles which took him to Stratford and the West End, and subsequently sustained three decades of work in the Melbourne Theatre Company. In the historical Cinerama epics of the 1950s and 1960s he attained international movie stardom and camp immortality, whether flinging unfortunates into the wolf-pit or leering insolently at the heroine as though promising an imminent fate featuring sadism and colourful unnamed perversions.
Fitzpatrick writes an informed and immensely readable double biography of these two remarkable and personally troubled men. As well as producing scholarly career biographies, he applies his skills as a novelist and scriptwriter to produce a judicious and empathetic interpretation of their thoughts and emotions. A series of internal soliloquies by his subjects are interposed amongst the chapters as creative interpretive riffs, marked off from the main text by italics, thus extending the biographer's remit into the novelist's territory. This handling of inner lives has to be mainly speculative and inductive, since the very private elder Thring carefully covered his tracks while his son elaborated a studied performative persona. Frank Senior's public career is, however, recoverable through the judicious use of documents, personal testimonies, newsreels and, of course, the feature films he produced and sometimes also directed. The film scholar Chris Long supplies a full filmography of Efftee's varied and ambitious output in feature and short films, variety shorts and documentary and educational films.
For discerning the inner life both concealed and revealed inside the son's bigger-than-Ben-Hur social identity, Fitzpatrick uses the generous and sane personal testimony of Joan Thring (née Cunliffe), Frank Junior's wife of one year, and of many others who knew him. Fitzpatrick carefully assesses the younger Frank's talent, and concludes that he could at times be an actor of considerable achievement and commitment. But, since his delightedly scandalized audiences seemed to prefer the outrageously naughty monster-cum-pussycat that was created for reasons of social and psychological camouflage, this is what Frank mainly gave them. They got it on the stage, in the foyer and on radio, and in several memorable character roles in the ‘Ozploitation’ outback-horror films of the 1970s and 1980s, when his father's dreams for a native industry came to at least a kind of fruition.
The author beautifully explicates the regional ethos and class specificities of the Australian, and specifically Melbourne, milieu which historically stamped and framed the careers of his subjects. Whether wheeling, dealing and outsmarting Hollywood's Twentieth Century Foxes (Frank Senior), or displaying malevolent lubricity in a series of toga-clad, bewigged and beringed villains in the company of Larry, Vivien or Chuck, they remained Melbourne boys who bounced into the larger international centres, not humbly in order to learn, but with massive self-assurance, in order to show the bastards how it's done. Their detailed and engrossing double biographies are a welcome contribution both to regional history and to international studies of twentieth-century entertainment careers.
