The most striking characteristic of this film is its splendid cinematography - for a cineast enjoying fine photography, this is an inexhaustible gold mine of fine sequences. The story is no less impressing, it's a true story, of how a determined farmer decided to rather drive his thousands of cows across all Australia than leave to the Japanese, as the invasion was imminent. It's a wondrous epic of surmounting atrocious difficulties, constantly under the threat of the herd starting a stampede, which the thousand bullocks actually do twice, and the question of the miracle of how so many cows could be well and appropriately directed into a film must arise. Well, they did it, and as a true story made almost like a documentary, it is better and more impressing than most westerns, excelling them all in downright determined stalwartness obliged by necessity, in absolutely genuine Aussie style.

With the fear of a Japanese invasion, the government wants to prepare for occupation and war in the thinly populated territories -- fewer than five thousand White men, as the narrator notes, and over a million head of cattle. The result is a cattle drive, led by Chips Rafferty and John Nugent Hayward, and this obvious western movie is set in Australia, produced by Ealing, and looks to have been the source of many of the drive scenes from Howard Hawks' Red River two years later.

That's almost certainly overstating it; it's not like there were ten thousand or so western movies produced in the US for Hawks, his writers, and his cameramen to lift shots from. While you can shoot a sequence of cattle crossing a river ten thousnd different ways, depending on where you place the cameras, there's certainly a family resemblance in the assortment., and Michael Balcon's staff at Ealing had seen their share of westerns too. So they took the obvious route for the movie, adding a score that seems a touch to heroic. Well, it's a wartime movie, and it was a massive undertaking. It's a very well done 'Shaky A' western, even though it isn't. And is.

THE OVERLANDERS is an Australian drama that was produced by Ealing Studios, of all places. Needless to say that it's completely unlike the affectionate British comedies that Ealing are best known for. Instead this is a hard-bidden story of cattle drovers working during WW2 to save thousands of their cattle from falling into the hands of the Japanese, who may well invade the north of the country.

History, of course, tells us that the Japanese never did get around to invading Australia, but nonetheless this story has a drive and momentum that sees it through. The story is told dispassionately with the central characters just as tough as the environment they're travelling through. THE OVERLANDERS works well by adopting a semi-documentary feel that enhances the realism and the drama of the various obstacles that the drovers face; cliffs and crocodiles are just but two of them. As the laconic hero, Chips Rafferty fills the screen perfectly, and Daphne Campbell proves her worth as the feisty young girl just as skilled as the older men.