Gallipoli [Includes Digital Copy] [Blu-ray]

Director: Peter Weir Peter Weir

Overview

The first of two consecutive films to see director Peter Weir team with Mel Gibson (the other being The Year of Living Dangerously), Gallipoli follows two idealistic young friends, Frank (Gibson) and Archy (Mark Lee), who join the Australian army during World War I and fight the doomed Battle of Gallipoli in Turkey. The first half of the film documents the lives of the young men in Australia, detailing their personalities and beliefs. The second half of the movie chronicles the ill-fated and ill-planned battle, where the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps is hopelessly outmatched by the enemy forces. Gallipoli was the recipient of eight prizes at the 1981 Australian Film Institute Awards.

Product Details

Release Date:	01/31/2023
UPC:	0191329239490
Original Release:	1981
Rating:	PG
Source:	Paramount
Language:	English
Time:	1:51:00
Sales rank:	10,710

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Mark Lee	Archy
Mel Gibson	Frank Dunne
Bill Kerr	Jack
Ron Graham	Hamilton,Wallace Hamilton
Harold Hopkins	McCann
Charles Yunupingu	Zac
Heath Harris	Stockman
Robert Grubb	Billy
Tim McKenzie	Barney
David Argue	Snowy
Bill Hunter	Maj. Barton
Gerda Nicolson	Rose Hamilton
Reg Evans	Official
Jack Giddy	Official
Dane Peterson	Announcer
Paul Linkson	Recruiting Officer
Jenny Lovell	Waitress
Steve Dodd	Billy Snakeskin
Robyn Galwey	Mary
Don Quin	Lionel
Phyllis Burford	Laura
Marjorie Irving	Gran
John Murphy	Dan Dunne
Diane Chamberlain	Anne Barton
Ian Govett	Army Doctor
Geoff Parry	Sgt. Sayers
Clive Bennington	English Officer
Giles Holland-Martin	English Officer
Moshe Kedem	Egyptian Shopkeeper
John Morris	Col. Robinson
Don Barker	NCO at Ball
Kiwi White	Soldier on Beach
Paul Sonkkila	Sniper
Peter Lawless	Observer
Saltbush Baldock	Sentry
Les Dayman	Artillery Officer
Stan Green	Sgt. Major
Max Wearing	Col. White
Graham Dow	Gen. Gardner
Peter R. House	Radio Officer
Harold Baigent	Camel Driver
Peter Ford	Lieutenant Gray
Brian Anderson	Railway Foreman
Brian May	Composer

Technical Credits

Peter Weir

David Williamson

Peter Weir	Director,Screenwriter
Patricia Lovell	Producer
Francis O'Brien	Executive Producer
Robert Stigwood	Producer
Ben Gannon	Producer
Chris Murray	Special Effects
Alison Barrett	Casting
Mont Fieguth	Special Effects
David Williamson	Screenwriter
Steven Richard Courtley	Special Effects

Editorial Reviews

This ambitious 1981 Australian epic boosted the international stock of leading man Mel Gibson -- already a cult favorite as a result of his work in Mad Max (1979) -- and helped make him a legitimate movie star. An intelligently written, finely calibrated story focusing on the relationship of two men enveloped by war, it also tagged director Peter Weir (Witness) as a filmmaker to be reckoned with. The 1915 Battle of Gallipoli, a signal event in the first World War, is to Australians what the siege of the Alamo is to Americans: a heartbreaking defeat rationalized over the years into a tremendous moral victory. It began when a modest army of Australian and New Zealand troops attempted to capture Istanbul and thus control the Dardanelles waterway. When Allied generals bungled the assault, the defending Turks rallied and subsequently inflicted heavy losses on the would-be invaders. In this movie, Weir more than adequately covers the historical record, but he never allows the siege to overwhelm the story of Frank Dunne (Gibson) and Archy Hamilton (Mark Lee), whose unlikely friendship is forged on the battlefield in the midst of bitter fighting and much bloodshed. The conflict is dramatized in Weir’s skillful depiction of battle scenes but also on a more intimate scale, seen through the eyes of the men embroiled in it. Gibson, playing the up-and-coming track star who abandons a promising career to enlist in the Australian Army Corps, exhibits a sensitivity that at this time had not yet been manifest in his acting. He makes Frank thoroughly believable, helping turn what might have been a routine war movie into a profoundly moving drama. In this he admirably serves Weir’s vision, which encompasses the human aspects of the war as well as the “big picture” details of the siege itself. Gallipoli triumphs at several levels, but its greatest accomplishment was establishing Gibson as a serious leading man, and it remains one of his finest motion pictures.

Barnes & Noble - Ed Hulse

Full of unforgettable imagery and stirring adventure, Gallipoli is both one of the cinema's best anti-war tracts and a poignant meditation on the nature of friendship. Beneath the film's war-is-hell message lies the simple tale of a young man who yearns to break away from the isolated life he has known since birth. A golden-skinned athlete, he radiates promise and naivete, and he symbolizes the generation lost to World War I. But wisely, director Peter Weir refrains from exploiting such symbolism to its treacly maximum. Instead, he makes Mark Lee's Archy a foil for Mel Gibson's more ironic, world-weary Frank, using them to fashion a parable about the loss of innocence and the vindication of cynicism. Some of the film's most stunning aspects lie in its images. Weir's landscapes appear simultaneously stark and lush, with the blinding sands of the Australian outback underscoring both geographical and existential isolation; the chaotic, lively setting of the film's battles makes the specter of death even more surreal and terrible. Perhaps the film's most striking image is that of Australian soldiers swimming underwater during a daytime air attack; the sight of their nude bodies silently thrashing through reddening water is one of troubling beauty. Preferring to take a somber rather than accusatory standpoint on the battle of Gallipoli, the film nonetheless manages to be a profound indictment of the stupidity and misjudgment that defined the catastrophic battle. Taken with its compelling portrait of the friendship of its two leads, Gallipoli makes its subject a highly personal one, giving a human face to the statistical cost of human failings.

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