Mention the phrase “great Australian actor” to most film fans and the conversation is bound to be filled with Kidman and co. And fair enough too; these past two decades have seen Australian acting finally gaining worldwide recognition with Oscar wins for Rush (1996, Shine), Crowe (2000, Gladiator), Kidman (2002, The Hours), Blanchett (2004, The Aviator) and of course Heath Ledger (2008, The Dark Knight); their wins have afforded them legendary status in the hall of Australian actors. However this famous five is not alone – there is a forgotten man.

Born Frederick George Peter Ingle-Finch, he became known to the world as Peter Finch, or Finchie, one of the original Australian legends of his craft - and of course our first Oscar Winner. One of the greats of the British cinema from the 50s to the 70s, Finch carved out an eclectic career that save for one or two classics, remains largely uncelebrated today (the DVD revolution still has much to revolutionise!).

Fear not – you’re not getting a biography.

You’re getting an insight into five films traversing cinema’s greatest eras all connected by the brilliance of one man – Peter Finch.

A Town Like Alice (1956)

A Town Like Alice wasn’t Finch’s first film; he’d made odd appearances on screen since the late 30s, but the stage remained his first love until Laurence Olivier convinced him to relocate to Britain at the turn of the 50s. From there, things started to grow – from the Sherriff of Nottingham in The Story Of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952) to a first stab at Hollywood opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Elephant Walk (1954), Finchie struck gold just a few years later.

Playing opposite Virginia McKenna, the film, based on the well-known novel by Nevil Shute, tells the story of a group of British women in Malaya in World War II. Having been invaded by the Japanese, the invaders take only the men prisoner (they obviously didn’t believe in the classic notion of “women and children first”!). Stranded, the women and children, under the guard of a solitary Japanese soldier (played by Kenji Takagi) have no means of survival, except the hope of finding a prison camp that will take them. And it’s on their travels they meet an Australian, Joe Harmon (played by Finch), who’s a POW put to work as a driver.

I can tell what you’re thinking in terms of a sappy war romance – but your thinking is dead wrong. The agonies of trekking thousands of miles back and forth across Malaya are never ignored, as wartime allegiances fade in the face of genuine human spirit. The story of the women is a great package on its own, but it’s no match for the love between Joe and Jean (McKenna).

Here’s my favourite scene:

A 2010 retelling would no doubt have Joe and Jean escape the ravages of war by inevitably ravaging each other, providing the required dosage of T&A that today’s studios think we all sorely need. Thankfully we’ve got actors and a director who believe in subtlety – they don’t need to even touch each other, it’s all in the eyes. And that Matyas Seiber score!

Needless to say scenes like this and the ending (which won’t be revealed, but it makes your reviewer cry every time) snaffled Finchie and McKenna BAFTA awards in Lead Actor and Lead Actress respectively, and a career was on the march!

No Love For Johnnie (1961)

The following five years symbolized Finchie’s career – films of indifference (Robbery Under Arms (1957) a rare British film actually shot in Australia, Operation Amsterdam (1959)), an occasional stab at Hollywood (The Nun’s Story (1959), opposite Audrey Hepburn) and of course, some incredible performances amongst them, for which he picked up two more BAFTA awards for Lead Actor in two relatively unknown films today, The Trials Of Oscar Wilde (1960) and No Love For Johnnie (1961), both unavailable on DVD to mainstream audiences today – your reviewer only picked up the latter as a free giveaway from a Greek newspaper by way of EBay (oh the places the internet and a debit card can take you!).

No Love For Johnnie was originally an extremely controversial novel by Wilfred Fienburgh that told of Johnnie Byrne (Finch), a burnt out, leftist leaning Labour parliamentarian who, in a newly elected government, is passed over for the position he hoped for. Unloved at work, he’s also unloved at home as his even more leftist leaning wife leaves him – see where the title comes in?

The ensuing film is a deliciously cynical look at both politics and relationships, and the way they can intertwine. Top marks go to Billie Whitelaw as the girl everyone knows Finchie should settle down with, but won’t; instead the middle-aged man chooses to shack up with a twenty year old party girl (Mary Peach) – sound familiar? Meanwhile at work he’s coerced by much more extreme leftists to challenge the Prime Minister on a matter of foreign policy – extreme leftists heading by a rather sinister Donald Pleasance.

Fans of last year’s In The Loop will notice a hilarious precursor of the electorate troubles faced by Simon Foster as Finchie is humiliatingly forced to confront the citizens of his own seat – no it’s not about a tipping wall but it’s equally irrelevant – and James Bond fans may notice Geoffrey Keen as the Prime Minister; Keen of course showed up in multiple Bond’s through the seventies and eighties playing the Minister Of Defence.

The rarity of the film means there’s no video of it on youtube, but there is this montage of film stills:

It doesn’t contain all the best moments, including one in which a drunken Finchie screams “bitch!” at Billie Whitelaw, or Oliver Reed’s blink-and-miss appearance, but it does have some of the constituent meeting from 1:54 onwards.

The Flight Of The Phoenix (1965)

Would the 60s be an era of consistency?

Certainly not!

There again followed the mix of some well renowned films (The Pumpkin Eater (1964) and Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)) with some abject failures (The Sins Of Rachel Cade (1961), In The Cool Of The Day (1962) and The Legend Of Lylah Clare (1968) only three) but possibly no other film represents his sixties blend of Pinewood and Hollywood better than Robert Aldrich’s big budget blockbuster The Flight Of The Phoenix (1965).

The film itself concerns a plane that crash lands into the Sahara, stranding an all-star cast with only a short supply of food and water. All seems lost for this crew of Brits and Americans – but there’s one man who has hope, why he says they can rebuild the plane, supplying what appears to be a foolproof plan for escape and survival.

There’s only one catch – he’s a German!

I won’t lie to you, acting wise this is not one of Finchie’s finest – however it’s a rare stint into action territory (above title billing too!) and he does a fairly decent job with his army captain who’s blind faith in his training tells him he can both make the march across the desert to some distant oasis, or even better, be able to have a matey chat with a bunch of potentially savage Bedouin.

Germans, savage Bedouin? After all, it’s still a World War 2 generation making these films (just!).

Here are the opening titles that will give you a glimpse into the amount of stars involved. And Ernest Borgnine.

Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)

After ten years in the awards wilderness, save for a Best Actor from the US National Board of Review for Far From The Madding Crowd (1967), Finchie came surging back as the 70s opened with another BAFTA win (his fourth) and a first Oscar nomination, playing opposite Glenda Jackson and Murray Head in John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.

It was a role that scared off many - playing a Jewish Doctor who’s competing with a woman for the affections of a young lover could have been bad enough, the added complexity that he was a homosexual made it even trickier. After Ian Bannen lost his nerve, in came Finchie.

What really makes this a Finchie special is that he’s so natural. Like in The Pumpkin Eater and Girl With Green Eyes (both 1964), we see an actor who has the intelligence to never dominate a scene he was not meant to; and a distaste for scenery-chewing that makes us all glad he never made a film with a latter-day Jack Nicholson. Compare the pair – if you told Big Jack in The Departed that a lover was leaving him and there was nothing he could do, even as a homosexual Jewish Doctor the great man would blow a fuse. But with Finchie, it’s handled with a level of emotional detachment that makes the other option seem like bad parody; which it would, considering his character doesn’t have enough passion to keep up an exclusive relationship in the first place.

He was so good that Roger Ebert was impressed enough to call him “flawless” and the film a “masterpiece.” Not bad.

Network (1976)

A first Oscar nomination unfortunately did not finally kick Finchie’s career into high-grade success; it teetered along, with Finchie spending two years going native in Jamaica before returning for his last role on the big screen:

Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet’s master satire of the media, Network.

This clip should tell you all need to know:

Put simply, the film is a work of genius. A super-sharp satire of newscasting that also starred William Holden, Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall spouting some of the sharpest dialogue ever written to one of cinema’s most incisive plots. And king of it all, beating out Sylvester Stallone (Rocky), Robert De Niro (Taxi Driver), Giancarlo Giannini (Seven Beauties) and Holden, winning his only Oscar in one of the best fields in cinematic history, was Finchie. Yes, after decades of inconsistent brilliance, it seemed that he had told himself that he was “not going to take it anymore” and pulled out what most reviewers will agree was his finest performance ever.

Does your reviewer agree? Personally I plump for A Town Like Alice as my personal favourite, but for starters, try Network; As the movie poster said: “television will never be the same.”

As a last word, some readers may try to claim that, due to the fact that he was not born here and mostly plied his craft overseas, that he was not an “Australian” actor. My response? He was a child born overseas who spent most of his formative years growing up Australian before becoming an expert in his chosen field. Think that’s un-Australian? Try telling that to Julia Gillard.

Andrew Collister