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Tag Archives: The High Commissioner (1968)
Blood Money and other Australian crime films you’ve probably never heard of
If you haven’t heard of the 1980 Australian film Bloody Money, don’t worry, you’d be in good company. Clocking in at just over 62 minutes, it’s an unpolished little gem of a heist film and almost completely unavailable.
John Flaus plays Pete Shields, an aging Sydney criminal who experiences an emotional epiphany after a diamond robbery he’s involved in goes violently wrong and his doctor informs him he’s got terminal cancer.
Shields returns to Melbourne, his hometown, where he has family, a little brother Brian (Aussie icon Bryan Brown), having trouble going straight, and Brian’s wife, Jeannie. There’s a lot of unfinished emotional business between them, including Shields’s affair with Jeannie years ago that may mean he is father of her and Brian’s daughter.
Pete also has unfinished criminal business with a gang run by Mister Curtis (Peter Stratford). To make sure his brother doesn’t fall back into their clutches, Pete takes Curtis’s gang apart man by man then kidnaps the crime boss’s daughter for a $50,000 ransom.
Blood Money has a definite Get Carter vibe, including the ending where Shields, having exchanged the daughter for the cash, is gunned in a remote quarry.
It’s not the greatest local crime film ever made, but Director John Ruane (who went on to do Death in Brunswick) gives it a grainy realism that draws the viewer in.… Read more
Posted in Australian crime film, Bryan Brown, Heist films, Peter Corris
Tagged Belinda Gibson, Blood Money (1980), Bob Ellis, Bryan Brown, Careful He Might Hear You (1983), Carl Schultz, Cliff Hardy, Death in Brunswick (1981), Denny Lawrence, Get Carter (1971) John Ruane, Goodbye Paradise (1983), Jack Thompson, John Flaus, Noel Ferrier, Peter Corris, Peter Stratford, Petersen (1974), Ray Barrett, Rod Taylor, Scobie Malone (1975), Sunday Too Far Away (1975), The Empty Beach (1985), The High Commissioner (1968)