Four NZ Stars

New Zealand film

A silent documentary film was made of the departure of troops for the Boer War in 1900; a Christchurch family made a home movie in 1910; silent features were made—Hinemoa in 1914, My lady of the cave in 1920, The adventures of Algy (1925), Moana (1926) and Frances of Feilding (1928); the Government
Publicity Office made Westland: by lake and glacier in New Zealand (1929) and Maori Days: sidelights on native life in New Zealand (1934); the first talkie was Coubray-tone News in 1929.

The first New Zealand feature talkie was completed in 1935: Down on the farm, of which little survives, though it seems to have been a romantic comedy very much in the aw-shucks Australian idiom of On our selection, Grandad Rudd 1 and their spin-offs. One of its stars was Gwenda Burt, in the 1930s a wellknown contralto singer and actor in Dunedin productions, particularly those of the Dunedin Operatic and Theatrical
Society.2 Down on the Farm was taken to England, where Cine Weekly savaged it, “The dialogue is a joke… the acting amateurish and the photography poor. After this our colonial cousins will be well advised to restrict their exports to mutton”.3