Some Great End-of-the-World Films

Sliding off-topic, though still on old films, I took delivery today of some old family 8mm reels that a baby sister no longer had room for - and to my total astonishment the collection includes a few reels of a home movie that I and all my other siblings had thought long vanished, following heat damage back in the sixties. It was produced by my maternal grandfather using his 3 children for the cast, titled “Tarzoola” starring my mother as a very young teenager clad in skimpy leopardskin, swinging from trees as a female version of Tarzan.

I have always retained a vivid memory of the one time Dad screened it for us, but there seems to be a part 2 that I will not have seen. I am very excited at the prospect of getting it carefully treated and digitised (Dad had at least one of the cannisters marked as too brittle to be projected.) Hopefully there will be places here in the UK that can treat such delicate material appropriately, as they have in the States; the film has to be 75 – 80 years old after all, and appallingly the cans were used as a stove support for some years.

It will have been my mother’s only film appearance; she was famous in her day (in Western Australia), but for radio and stage acting and singing, not in film – my grandfather was for a time WA’s only ‘film star’, with a role in “The Overlanders” as well as several other wartime propaganda movies. Perhaps that experience led him to steer Mum away from the scene!