May Howlett Movies
- 1987
- PG13
Gillian Armstrong directed this powerful and moving film containing a brilliant performance by Judy Davis. The story takes place in the small New South Wales seaside village of Eden. Davis is Lillie, who is renting a run-down trailer as she waits for her car to be repaired. One night, when Lillie is drunk and cannot walk from the toilet block back to her trailer, a teenage girl, Ally (Claudia Karvan) -- who lives with her free-spirited grandmother Bet (Jan Adele) in another trailer in the trailer park -- helps her back home. Lillie and Ally become good friends, and it is only when Lillie finally meets Bet that she realizes that Ally is, in fact, her own daughter, who she abandoned years earlier after the death of her husband. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Judy Davis, Jan Adele, (more)
- 1986
- R
Originally titled The Umbrella Woman, The Good Wife is set in an Australian lumber town in 1939. Marge Hills (Rachel Ward), the bored wife of kindly-but-dull Sonny Hills (Bryan Brown) begins dreaming of outside romances. She unexpectedly gets her wish in the form of Sonny's much-younger brother Sugar (Steven Vidler), whom Sonny cheerfully offers to his wife as a surrogate bedmate. Given this curious arrangement, one wonders why Marge is so upset when she is propositioned by handsome stranger Neville Gifford (Sam Neill). Eventually, Gifford sleeps with every other woman in town but Marge. Fed up with the unimaginative lovers in her own house, Marge finally gives in to Gifford, arousing the jealousy not of the cloddish Sonny, but of the immature Sugar. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Rachel Ward, Bryan Brown, (more)
- 1984
The miners strike in the Australian coal fields during the 1930s provides a factual basis for this drama. The organized miners protest against the use of scab labor and the dreadful working conditions. But nothing is resolved and the tension climaxes with the miners, some of them members of the Communist Party, building a blockade and stranding themselves in a mine shaft. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Chris Haywood, Carol Burns, (more)
