Age of Consent

Synopsis: Feature film based on a novel by Norman Lindsay. Brad Morahan is a disenchanted artist who hides himself away on the Great Barrier Reef. There he encounters the drunken Ma Ryan and her pretty grand-daughter Cora. Morahan takes Cora as a model. An acquaintance of Brad’s, Nat Kelly, destroys the idyll. In a fight between Cora and Ma Ryan over money, the latter falls to her death. A verdict of accidental death is returned and Kelly is arrested.
Language: English (Australia)
Country: Australia
Medium: Film
Technical information: Colour / Sound
Year of release: 1969
Duration: 98 mins; 8,791 feet

Director

Michael Powell

Producer

James Mason; Michael Powell

Cinematographer

Hannes Staudinger

Screenplay

Peter Yeldham

Music

Stanley Myers

Cast

Notes: The copy held by the BFI National Archive is the British release version, with six minutes cut (mostly the early art gallery scenes), and a new music track replacing Peter Sculthorpe’s original.
General: Michael Powell spent much of his later life trying to raise money for a film of The Tempest; James Mason was to have played Prospero and Mia Farrow, Ariel. Tony Howard in ‘Shakespeare’s Cinematic Offshoots’, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film’ (London: CUP, 2000), p. 197 observes that ‘The Tempest’s allure for ageing male directors is obvious’.
Reviews: Richard Coombs, Monthly Film Bulletin (Vol.36, no.431, December 1969), p.256. Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema (London: BFI, 1992). pp.99-100.

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British Universities Film & Video Council