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| Poster from www.nfsa.gov.au |
OZmovies in particular has an excellent microsite - The Silence of Dean Maitland - whose creator has put in a deal of research in compiling primary material relating to the film and its making: production details; Ken Hall's own account of its inception (in part arising from seeing an unintentionally hilarious am-dram production); the story of its problems with censors; and large gallery of images including posters, stills, and news clippings.
Australian Screen Online ("Australia’s audiovisual heritage online") also has a very good overview - The Silence of Dean Maitland - with three clips from the film. As the curator's commentary says, it retained a deal of the flavour of its melodramatic and silent movie origins. The "Fisher of women" scene, where Alma Lee hits on Maitland, is particularly weird; in the book, Alma Lee was a naive rustic 19-year-old coachman's daughter, but Charlotte Francis plays her as a slightly mad and totally obvious seductress with a clipped upper-crust English accent.
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| Alma gets her hooks into Maitland: The Silence of Dean Maitland (1934) |
Alma: "Any luck?"
Maitland: "No. As a fisherman, I'm a good curate."
Alma: "I thought all ministers were fishers."
Maitland: "We are - of men."
Alma: <leaning close> "Men? Only?"
Not exactly subtle stuff ... The film was released in Britain by RKO in 1935.While not remotely explicit by modern standards, it almost certainly couldn’t have been made in the USA at that time, as the post-1930 Motion Picture Production Code - aka the Hays Code - stated that “Ministers of religion in their character as ministers of religion should not be used as comic characters or as villains”. Maitland isn't exactly a villain, more an ambitious but naive character in deep denial about the moral consequences of his actions; but the story doesn't present a clergyman in a good light.
We might have seen another Australian production of the story. In 1988, Kylie Minogue said she was considering doing "a mini-series set in the Fifties called The Silence of Dean Maitland. Dean is a priest and I play a young girl called Diane who has an affair with him. It is very heated." (Kylie: Showgirl- the unofficial biography, Bryony Sutherland, Lucy Ellis, Omnibus Press, 2002). That one never came to be.
- Ray