Turning Point (1960 film)

Turning Point is a 1960 Australian television play, broadcast at a time when local drama was rare.[2]

Turning Point
Genrethriller
Written byDenys Burrows
Directed byRaymond Menmuir
Country of originAustralia
Original language(s)English
Production
Producer(s)Raymond Menmuir
Running time75 mins
Production company(s)ABC
Release
Original networkABC
Original release24 February 1960 (live, Sydney)
9 March 1960 (taped, Melbourne)[1]

It was broadcast live on the ABC from Sydney on the night of 24 February. In Melbourne the ABC were doing a live broadcast of the play Eye of the Night. These two were the first in a series of ten plays made by the ABC in 1960 using local writers, others including The Astronauts and The Slaughter of St Teresa's Day. (Other plays possibly included Close to the Roof, Dark Under the Sun, The Square Ring, Who Killed Kovali?, and Swamp Creatures.) [3]

Plot

A murderer (Rod Milgate) stops in a remote South Australian town, kidnaps one of its women (Benita Harvey) when he thinks the town's policeman (Deryck Barnes) is going to arrest him. He runs off with her, punctures his petrol tank, but returns to kill her children after she runs away while he sleeps. The policeman arrives just in time to save the situation.

Cast
  • Deryck Barnes
  • Jane Coghlan
  • Tom Farley
  • Ben Gabriel
  • Benita Harvey
  • Reg Lye
  • Rod Milgate

Production

It was the first of ten television plays to be produced by the ABC in Sydney and Melbourne in 1960. The writer Denys Burrows was also an actor; it was his first TV plays. He based the settings and the character on a trip he made through central Australia.[4]

Reception

The Sydney Morning Herald called it "an unsuccessful attempt to graft an unconvincing crime melodrama on to a documentary treatment of outback life... The author's observation is better than his plot-planning and when the life of the remote, heat-hammered cluster of shacks was allowed to move along its normal lines and at its own pace, there were moments of genuine interest and accomplishment—except that the pace of Raymond Menmuir's production... tended to be a bit slow. A competent cast... worked very effectively when they were allowed by the script to be real characters."[5]

References
  1. "Drama in Plays By Australians TV Series". The Age. 3 March 1960. p. 14.
  2. Vagg, Stephen (18 February 2019). "60 Australian TV Plays of the 1950s & '60s". Filmink.
  3. Marshall, Valda (31 January 1960). "TV Merry Go Round". Sydney Morning Herald. p. 80.
  4. "Hunt for Kidnapper". Sydney Morning Herald. 22 February 1960. p. 21.
  5. "Crime Story As Life Play On TV". Sydney Morning Herald. 25 February 1960. p. 6.


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