Travelling North

David Williamson's filmed play is a bit like an Australian On Golden Pond. Frank (McKern) retires to his Queensland dream home overlooking a lake with his middle-aged girlfriend Frances (Blake), but heart trouble erodes the idyll. A bossy old bully, Frank soon offends their boring but helpful neighbour Freddie (Kennedy), overrides the local doctor (Szeps) in the matter of prognosis and prescription, and drives even patient Frances back to her daughters in Melbourne with his increasing cantankerousness. This slight, unsensational history depends almost entirely upon our sympathy for the central character, a shoo-in thanks to the McKern outline in shorts, eye-patch and paunch. The actor would serve as a definition of the word curmudgeon. 'The autumn of our days?' he mocks the registrar, having asked Frances to return and marry him, 'Get on with it before we slide into winter'.