Charlotte Rampling as Grace McAlister and Russell Crowe as East Driscoll starred in the 1992 film ‘Hammer Over the Anvil’.
Based on a story by Alan Marshall, who had suffered polio as a child, Hammers Over the Anvil takes place in 1910 centred around a crippled boy who idolises a breaker named East Driscoll played by a youthful Russell Crowe.
HAMMERS OVER THE ANVIL (1992)
Starring Charlotte Rampling and Russell Crowe, directed by Ann Turner.
The film poster for ‘Hammer Over the Anvil’ (1992).
“Russell would come
to me in Mansfield and
I’d take him riding.”
East Driscoll exudes vigorous masculinity and is adored by the local girls. He can’t write but he can ride okay – except during the film’s gloomy finale. Things did not end well!
Sixteen-year-old Alexander Outhred was cast as the boy. He performed exceptionally well, won a film award but left the business and is today a research scientist. Crowe, of course, is still making pictures, the latest being Nuremberg, in which he is cast as Hermann Goring.
During pre-production of Hammers Over the Anvil the actor was literally running between two film locations – he had won the lead in Romper Stomper, being shot in Melbourne, so consequently his head was shaved and he was covered in tattoos. In country Victoria he had to learn to handle horses and ride like a skilful breaker in preparation for his leading role in Hammers to be filmed in South Australia.
The major movie horsemen hired by the producers were Bill Willoughby and Gerald Egan, two talented riders, trainers and stunt doubles who schooled the actors and supplied wranglers and horses.
“Every weekend and spare day off from Romper Stomper Russell would come to me in Mansfield and I’d take him riding; he’d had very little horse experience,” recalls Gerald. “He wanted to have a beer at the pub after working but I told him he wouldn’t be let in with his skinhead and tatts!”
Top images: Russel Crowe as East Driscoll in the scene where he swims his horse sans clothes. Bottom left: Charlotte Rampling as Grace McAlister and Russell Crowe as East Driscoll. Bottom right: Sixteen-year-old Alexander Outhred plays the young boy in the film.
TRIVIA: During film school, director Ann Turner climbed tall towers to film horse races for racing stewards.
Charlotte Rampling came from Britain to play opposite Crowe as Grace McAlister, the middle-aged wife of a rich property owner who has an affair with him. “Now she was a very accomplished rider,” continues Gerald, “and she was a lovely lady.”
(Years later, in 2022, Charlotte commented in an aside that the then 28-year-old Russell was “a very attractive young man. I had a flirt; you can leave it at that.”)
Egan doubled for Crowe in the sequence where lovestruck East transfers the stylish McAlister from her horse on to his. “But he did much of his own riding, although when he’s going through town on the stallion it’s Bill who’s on the horse.”
When Crowe initially read that the script had him swimming nude and riding horses in the river, he didn’t want to do it. “A double was organised, but at the last minute he decided to have a go,” recalls Gerald. “And he did a good job.”
In the final cut where you can’t see Russell’s face, a wrangler, Alan Heath, was in the water with the horses; in all the other sequences the actor was doing the swimming, smiling broadly, riding bareback and showing his bottom (his other bits and pieces are obscured by dark shadows).
“The one he rode in the water was Smoke, a Quarter Horse, and the Thoroughbred who followed him was Maurie.” Featured in this footage are shots of an anxious chestnut tied to a tree next to the river. Big and Strong was a Thoroughbred stallion which Gerald had brought from Mansfield to South Australia. “We carted him around for six months,” he remembers.
Action on the initial shooting schedule had called for the stallion to be serving a mare for real while the leading man and woman were doing something similar in a shed. “It had been perfectly timed and the mare came into season on the exact day it was to be filmed.”
Then director Turner made an announcement: “I don’t want to do that scene anymore”.
“What a headache.” That’s moviemaking for you.
“The horses we had in those days were all multipurpose. They were being ridden by actors one day and pulling carts the next,” Gerald continues. “They were our livelihood and looked after like movie stars. Once a picture begins you can’t afford for them to get hurt or sick – it affects filming.
“With livestock, we’d often camp near them, not in the accommodation provided by the production. We’d get the horses settled and feeling at home, sleep in swags in our trucks and then rehearse the scenes the day before the crew set up.”
TRIVIA: “This film is best known for its nude scene featuring Russell Crowe before he became a big star and started throwing telephones at people.” – Robert Roten, US film critic.
Rusell Crowe on horseback during the film.
The first film Gerald worked on was The Man from Snowy River. Its publicity was always about Tom Burlinson as Jim Craig doing all his own stunts – which wasn’t true. Gerald Egan did much of the dangerous work but never claimed it publicly.
“You know the rules, Suzy,” he tells me. “It was Jim Craig who did the riding!” And that’s all he would say.
After making 30 films Gerald retired from the business to spend more time in Mansfield with his then young children. “It was a fantastic life, I never got hurt and could afford to put my kids through uni. One’s a vet, the other a podiatrist.”
Horsemaster Bill Willoughby still rides, teaches and runs Willoughby Way Horsemanship from Pekina, South Australia.
Today Gerald Egan trains racehorses and apprentice jockeys: “It’s a lot easier training them to ride than actors!” Many of his pupils, like Luke Nolen and Neil Kearney, have been successful in Group Ones.
“Racing’s a bit like films – half of it is dealing with the people, the other half with the animals,” says Gerald. “But you do get a bit of a break in the film industry whereas racing goes seven days a week!”
Hammer Over the Anvil won wide praise from the critics. “A most likeable and effective drama, splendidly acted, confidently directed and always a pleasure to the eye,” wrote Walter Sullivan in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph Mirror. “Charlotte Rampling, still as alluring as ever, gives an altogether convincing performance as the adventurous, dissatisfied wife. Russell Crowe makes a compelling figure of the horseman – one of the best films of recent years.”
“Russell Crowe gives an impressively physical performance,” wrote Bernard Hemingway in Cinephilia.
Although not released theatrically until 1994, the film was shot late in 1991 and is thus a contemporary of Romper Stomper.
The film can be viewed on DVD and YouTube.
Next time in ‘Horses and Movies’, Ride with the Devil (1999), directed by Ang Lee and starring Tobey Maguire. EQ
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