sully4441

Hi, can someone help please.
I have managed to get hold of a copy of the Australian mini series on pal vhs for my moms birthday, I've tried to get hold of a original copy but no luck - even a friend in Aus has had no luck, but I need a copy of the video sleeve. Can anyone help me out please by scanning and sending me an image at the best resolution that won't take 2 weeks to download? Moms birthday is on 17th April, so it's a bit last minute
Cheers Lee Sullivan

MrsDagboy

Sorry I cant help with the video sleeve, but what an excellent present. That mini-series was a great, Neville Shute is the most fabulous story writer, I have quite a few of his books & I just adore them. I only have the book, I dont think scanning the cover of that would help.

Hope someone can help, good luck with finding something!

Vicky88

I can remember watching the original version of the movie when I was a kid, think it was in black and white. Fantastic movie, great book. Hope someone can help you out.

MikeStanton

You're after the 1956 version with Peter Finch and Virginia McKenna.

BTW, you can buy the original video, Eg, in the UK try:A Town Like Alice

A quick search on the net revealed this pic.

arlene

ive got the mini series and bryan brown in just yummmmyy


arlene

sully4441

thanks for taking the time and trouble to reply. I've been trying to find this video for ages after mother talked me through the plot blow for blow in real time. It is the Australian mini series she wants Mike, not the old Peter Finch one, but thanks for the image. Arlene any chance you can scan a full size copy of the cover please? The original is now out of print and it was only ever published on ntsc. Found a company here who transfers to vhs pal, but sadly no cover. Lee

anya4oz

Can't help with the vid sleeve but the series sounds interesting. I loved the book, but although I enjoyed the film (last seen some years ago) ISTR they'd 'adjusted' the story line a bit. If the mini series is nearer to the book, I'll deffo have to buy it when I get to Oz.

IMO , the other great Shute novel is 'No Highway', and ISTR the film paralled the storyline well. It became quite a cult on a US re-release, resulting in computer programmers all over New England referring to bugs that were hard to track down as 'The Reindeer Syndrome'.

Eeeh, them were the days

Anya.

Pollyana

"On the Beach" is good too, both book and film. Very spooky.:scared:

Grayling

I quite like Neville Shute books but, to be honest, 'A town like Alice'. was a blatantly propagandist attempt to encourage migration to Australia from the UK after the war.
It is full of references to 'The Beastly new health service' and the way workers were using the 'sick note' system to avoid work. Alice's poor father who was a doctor could no longer afford any servants on his lousy NHS salary.
There were also constant references to food rationing in the UK and how Australiands had 'Steak and Eggs' for breakfast.
I am sure it was commissioned by the Australian government

G

MikeStanton

When they made the original film of the book - in Melbourne - in the late '50s, Ava Gardner supposedly commented something like "If you wanted to make a film about the end of the world, this would be the location"

Megalania

Produced by Rank Films - British.
A TOWN LIKE ALICE

If you have finished with them, could we have the WWII tins of suet back now please - wafoo1 needs them.

Megalania

On The Beach - The Film and The Actors' Perspectives (Ava Gardner's comments)

Megalania

The character Joe Harmon was based on Jim Edwards:

-------------------------------------....------------------------------------

Thirty years later, in 1948, Shute visited Australia to gather material for a novel and, while travelling in Queensland, heard of and later met an Australian former prisoner of war, Herbert ‘Jim’ (or ‘Ringer’) Edwards. The Australian had a truly remarkable story to tell. In 1943, while a prisoner of war in Burma on the Burma-Thailand Railway, he and two other prisoners had been sentenced to death by the Japanese for killing native cattle as food for themselves and their mates. Bound at the wrists with fencing wire, the men were suspended from a tree and beaten with a baseball bat. When Edwards managed to free his right hand, his punishment was continued with the fencing wire driven through his palms. Incredibly, Jim Edwards somehow survived his ordeal, which lasted for sixty-three hours, although both his comrades died. He died, aged eighty-six, at his retirement farm at Gingin in Western Australia in June 2000.
14

14 Jim Edwards was a private soldier in the 2/26th Battalion, 8th Australian Division. My account of his ordeal is based on ‘An Interview with Jim Edwards, 3 November 1966, conducted by John Thomson’, unpublished typescript, J. S. Battye Library Oral History Programme (OH10), J. S. Battye Library, Perth, Western Australia, pp. 1–2. See also ‘Digger inspired epic POW novel’, The West Australian, ? June 2000, p. ?? and Humphrey McQueen, Japan to the Rescue: Australian Security Around the Indonesian
Archipelago During the American Century (Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1991), pp. 310–316. Shute’s biographer Julian Smith wrongly states that Edwards was ‘nailed down by the Japanese’, Nevil Shute, p. 99.

-----------------------------....-------------------------------

I met Jim Edwards several times at his Mt Edgar Station SSE of Mable Bar, WA circa 1967.

One of his more notable achievements was driving his founding herd of cattle from Catherine, NT to his station.

About the story "A Town Like Alice": not how it happened he said.

sully4441

Okay, the hunts off - sort of - I found a reasonable image on Amazon international. Thanks to anyone who looked. Would prefer a scanned copy of the whole video cover if possible though - hint, hint, for those that have the Aus copy starring Helen Morse etc. Nice to see what a literary bunch you are - never read a Shute book I'm afraid. All the best LMS