Pallet on the Floor

Pallet on the Floor
Pallet on the Floor
Directed by	Lynton Butler
Written by	Ronald Hugh Morrieson (novel); Martyn Sanderson (screen) &; Lynton Butler, Robert Rising
Produced by	Larry Parr
Starring	Bruce Spence; Marshall Napier; John Bach; Bruno Lawrence; Terence Cooper ; Peter Rowley ; Ian Watkin
Cinematography	Kevin Hayward
Music by	Bruno Lawrence (musical director & composer) ; Jonathan Crayford & Barry Johnstone (composer-arrangers)
Release date	1986;
Running time	88 min.
Language	English

Pallet on the Floor is a 1986 New Zealand made comedy-drama film, based on the final novel by Ronald Hugh Morrieson. Shot in 1983 at Patea, partly in a closed-down abattoir, the film was given limited release in New Zealand three years later.

The main role of abattoir worker Sam Jamieson is played by veteran actor Peter McCauley.

Pallet on the Floor is the only feature film directed by Lynton Butler, who earlier made One of those Blighters, a television production which fictionalised Morrieson's life.

Actor and musician Bruno Lawrence contributed to the jazz score, and has a small cameo role playing Morrieson as a bass player at a wedding.

The focus of the plot was shifted to the character of the British remittance man in the hope that Peter O’Toole would take the role. This did not occur. While billed as comedy, the film depicts 1960s racism and class divisions, and maintains Morrieson's trademark preoccupations .... of sex, death, mateship, voyeurism, violence, booze and mayhem in bleak small town New Zealand.^[1]

Plot

Life was hard enough for Sam Jamieson without Jack Voot's lechery and Miriam Breen's jealousy. Then life at Kurikino erupted into a sensation of murder and blackmail, turning his life into a nightmare from which the efforts of Tinny Entwistle, Gigglejuice Saunders and the Remittance Man could not save him. But Spud McGhee had an idea .... . Sam never gets round to working on his cottage, he goes to the Brian Boru the only hotel in Kurikino, run by Amos Blennerhasset. Wife Sue is pregnant. Sam works at 'the big slaughter-house across the bridge at the foot of the hill' known as 'the Works'.^[2]

Cast

Peter McCauley as Sam Jamieson
Jillian O'Brien as Sue Jamieson
Bruce Spence as Basil Beaumont-Foster (the Remittance Man)
Shirley Gruar as Miriam Breen
Alastair Douglas as Stan Breem
Tony Barry as Larkman (the cop)
Jeremy Stephens as Spud McGhee
Michael Wilson as Shorty Larsen
Terence Cooper as Brendon O'Keefe
John Bach as Jack Voot
Marshall Napier as Joe Voot
Curly del Monte as Mason Voot
Peter Rowley as Henderson
Ian Watkin as Amos
Sonny Waru as Mohi Te Kiri
John Rist as Gigglejuice Saunders
Bruno Lawrence as Ronald Hugh Morrieson

External links

References

^ New Zealand Film 1912-1996 by Helen Martin & Sam Edwards p121 (1997, Oxford University Press, Auckland) ISBN 019 558336 1
^ Publisher’s blurb on the back cover of the 1976 novel

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[1] New Zealand Film 1912-1996 by Helen Martin & Sam Edwards p121 (1997, Oxford University Press, Auckland) ISBN 019 558336 1

[2] Publisher’s blurb on the back cover of the 1976 novel

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