Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

117
stead. In many ways [it] perhaps galvanized his thinking to make sure that he didn’t fall
into that same situation again”. 400 Ultimately White became a successful producer
working overseas, and Ward concentrated his energies on directing and writing.
Not only were Anne Flannery’s contacts in the acting world very useful in the casting of
the film, her interpretation of the role of Malfred Signal also made a significant
contribution. Her approach (as described in Programme Notes for the US exhibition of
the film) focused on Malfred as an unmarried woman in New Zealand society at the
time.
The film is set in the late 1950s – it really tells the story of a generation of
women who were thirty or thereabouts when World War II finished, and who
were single or widowed at that time. Perhaps they lost a boyfriend or a husband
in the war. In New Zealand society, at that time, a woman who was in that
position was considered ‘over the hill’, beyond all marital or sexual possibility.
This tells the story of one such woman and what became of her. 401
The Production Notes for the film also noted Ward’s perfectionism: “the crazy energy
that sometimes fired the project”, for example in a scene that was not included in the
final edit:
Late in the story, Ward wanted to show Malfred Signal lying still while large
flies crawled over her face. In order to attract the flies, he laid out some rotting
meat. Then he bought a drug to slow the flies down. They still went too fast.
So he got some airplane glue and glued their wings together. As Anne Flannery,
like a real trouper, held her breath, the treated flies walked down her face and
over her nose and open mouth.
The example demonstrates not only Ward’s obsessive concern with detail, but also
Anne Flannery’s commitment to the film, which extended as far as looking after Ward
when he, wanting to “capture a sense of Malfred’s environment”, lived on location for a
long period. Ward recalls: “It was a long way away from the shops and I had no
transport. Yet each day, Anne Flannery would bring food for me, unsolicited and
400 Lynette Read, interview with Timothy White, 29 September 1999.
401 Anne Flannery quoted in A State of Siege and in Spring One Plants Alone: Programme Notes
(Plainfield, USA: Universal Life, 1980-81).