A Cry In The Dark (Evil Angels)

Any thoughts in this movie from 1988, starring Meryl Streep as Lindy Chamberlain, wrongly convicted of slaughtering her child daughter Azaria in the Australian outback in the early 80s?

Any recollections?

I take into account Spielberg saying it was once the best possible film of the yr. I believe it was once prescient for shooting tabloid tradition. Streep and Sam Neill are very good in it.

I have in mind “The dingo ate my child.”

Meryl should have received the Oscar, as competitive as that yr was.

She won Best Actress at Cannes, New York Film Critics and Australia's Best Actress award too.

What's the point of making a child wear that cap, it's not for heat and it seems itchy as fuck. Maybe that child had a demise want and sought after to be eaten through the dingo.

The "dingo ate my baby" line now not withstanding, Sam Neill as the husband that supports her, however eventually cracks and loses faith in her via the finish of the movie used to be a stand out. Not the showy performance of M, but very affective

Loved the whole lot about that movie! It's my Steel Magnolias!

It was outstanding prescient

M wasn't showy in this ...I felt she gave a really great efficiency. She should have received the oscar.

You'll by no means convince me I did not do it.

Possibly Meryl's perfect efficiency.

Is this the film Meryl were given her dirty pillows out in the shower scene?

One of the most beautiful actresses in movie history, not afraid to deglam

Sam Neill is so scorching. Young in this movie.

Another of Meryl's many "accent roles".

R18 do you expect her to do the ones roles in her NJ accessory? She's a fucking actress

No--I'm just suggesting she turns out to hunt out roles that require that she do an accent.

Meryl stole that coiffure from Natasha!

She did not search out roles, do you perhaps assume the filmmakers idea, we'd like a well-known actress who can pull off an accent?

I worked for a talent company in LA again in the late 80s. Evil Angels had finished production and used to be readying for unlock by way of the end of the year. The studio did not maintain the title and used to be seeking to come up with something that was once "more commercial". It went through a few different titles and more or less became a contest in my office. The greatest blockbuster that year had been Three Men and a Baby, so i got here up with the title "Three Dingoes and a Baby". It caught and everyone in my office referred to that identify even long after the movie become A Cry in the Dark.

Her very best efficiency together with Silkwood in that she disappears into an everyday personality. IIRC a lot of "deplorables" who hate her on show outdoor the courthouse. Trashy even by Aussie requirements.

If you watch closely, you'll be able to realize there are few close ups. I think that actually is helping floor her efficiency and keeps it from being as showy as it another way may were. I think in a few of the extra emotional exchanges in the courtroom the digital camera is not even on her. Could be false memory but that used to be my impact.

Sam Neill used to be a good-looking hunk. This is one in every of the few M performances I love. I will be able to't stand most of her paintings.

I watched this movie about 10 years in the past. It's really attention-grabbing as it was once ahead of it's time. The movie is actually about "Instant fame" and the effect it has on you and those around you. Also, the "court of public opinion". In our current era of social media and "cancel culture" it would be fascinating to observe again.

Was the child actually eaten by the dingo? Did they ever found the bones?

I'm really not most often a Streep fan, however I agree that this used to be a terrific performance from her. It didn’t really feel so self-aware and cutesy like Streep performances generally do. And Sam Neill was once additionally terrific.

There is something unique about this movie. It’s nearly like a movie-sized soap opera or a bigger price range TV film of the week. I in reality loved it regardless that.

R24 interesting about the lack of closeups. Maybe that’s the je ne sais quoi I appreciated about this movie: it treats Meryl Streep simply the similar as it will have treated some C-list actress.

Streep could be very convincing. I feel Judy Davis or Wendy Hughes will have done well too, but they weren't global field place of work attractions...

R28, the body was never discovered. Just a singlet and bloody jumpsuit.

In 2012, a 3rd inquest concluded that . . .

The dingo are her baby.

That used to be after a string of different dingo attacks on babies used to be publicized.

There was once a 1983 Australian TV film called Who Killed Baby Azaria? that offered a number of situations for what took place that evening.

R28 sure, they found the baby jacket years later and it had dingo bites in it.

R31 this if truth be told had a very limited unlock for some reason and made very little money. It wasn't even released in most of the international.

That horrible bowl haircut ...... Of direction she did it!

Shut up Patsy Ramsey at R38

The exact line, in real life, was "The dingo's got my baby."

Maybe the producers thought Americans would not understand what "got" meant. At that time we had been simply rising from the generation when Australian motion pictures were subtitled for the US.

The final inquest established, IIRC, that a dingo or similar large dog did take the child. It discovered there was once most probably human interference with the garments earlier than they were found - but that can have come from somebody who later found them and/or the stays and took fright at the idea of turning into concerned in such an unpredictable case. The inquest also established that key skilled forensic evidence in opposition to Lindy at the trial that jailed her was just undeniable mistaken and that in reality there wasn't the rest to indicate she murdered the kid. Lindy remains to be alive and has given moderately fresh interviews about the entire thing and how she has managed to place it in viewpoint and get on with her lifestyles. Her ultimate kids, now grown up, all seem to be very connected to her.

PS Meryl Streep's accessory in that film used to be very a lot not considered one of her triumphs. Lindy's accent is a tricky mixture of Aus and NZ, but Streep completed neither that nor both of them in my opinion. The queen of the Australasian accessory is Kate Winslet. She may just cross for Australian anywhere.

Seinfeld episode the place Elaine is attending a boring birthday celebration and answers a girl's query with Australian accessory "the dingoes ate my baby."

R40 she sounded similar to Lindy you shit

Australians at all times say her dialect is terrible in this.

Her "best" efficiency when she said she knew nothing about Harvey Weinstein, by no means heard any rumors about him, YET warned her fledgling actress daughter to stay away from him. I lost all recognize for her ...she deserves as Oscar for being knowledgeable LIAR.

I don't think Australians should disparage somebody's accent.

I'm an Aussie and she fooled me

[quote] Seinfeld episode the place Elaine is attending a dull birthday celebration and solutions a girl's question with Australian accent "the dingoes ate my baby."

[buzzer]

The girl was once wondering aloud where her “child” (her boyfriend) had long past. Elaine appears to be like at her and says “Maybe the dingo ate your baby.”

I be mindful her calling it a “babby.” Good movie, though. I simply watched Heartburn and Sophie’s Choice once more. She really was once nice.

Still is R48

It's the motion pictures that got crappier

Don Gummer in point of fact latched onto a goldmine when he wed La Streep. His sculptures are dreadful.

I love Heartburn ... haven't observed it in years!

Australia also has that peculiar case of 3 children missing from the similar circle of relatives...but I do not believe the dingoes are being implicated here.

One of her very best. I used to study her in this movie as a teenager, and run around pestering family and friends with monologues and bits of debate from this.

Wait! Wait! A dingo ate my child! A dingo ate my child!

Could you believe if a dingo ran off along with your child and no one believed you!

One her really highest performances. Her remaining nice one.

Australia will have to be a infanticidal maniac's myth. You don't even need to lie about black men hijacking your automotive and killing your babies. All you must do is take them camping out where the dingos can get them.

Did she see the dingo take her child? I cant take into account if the baby was in the tent by myself asleep.

R51 I don’t know why it got dangerous opinions!

A few critics felt this was once her absolute best performance because you can see she was once struggling with the accessory. It freed her efficiency up in other essential areas and did not make it as stagey as she normally is.

Australian threads are always such fun!

They flush out the crass, I’ll-educated Americans who know nothing about the place.

Every single time.

Yes I agree the accent is a mix of Oz and New Zealand. Like in the famous scene, where she cries, "You're talking about my baby daughter. Not some object." The approach she says object is more NZ-ish.

I'm no longer certain why folks - silly people - are occurring about how "prescient" this movie used to be. Erm, it in reality took place! Duh. Were the occasions themselves then, uh, prescient...?

I assume it was once the canary in the coal mine because it may well be stated the media frenzy surrounding this situation that nearly price an innocent woman her existence, was whipped up by the Murdoch media in Australia. That's the thread. He just moved on to larger platforms.

Correction:

[quote]We're talking about my baby daughter... Not. Some. ObjecT."

:swoon:

Australians have that same vicious , dumb, and reactionary element that many Americans do. Probably from the same culture (scotch irish , scottish, irish) too. There was really nothing unbelievable about her story. Only a bunch of morons would think it was impossible. Then again, Australia we as the same place where a child aids patient was driven out of town in the 80s and had to settle with their family in New Zealand (where they were apparently welcomed).

R63 I don't think you can claim that the Murdoch media "whipped" the people into what R65 describes as being 'vicious, dumb, and reactionary'.

They were responding to—

1. the Chamberlains' strange religion (Seventh Day Adventist). 2. the missing child's strange name (they speculated it meant 'sacrifice win the desert'). 3. Lindy Chamberlain's unemotional responses (the recent authorised 40 year anniversary doco says those unemotional responses were due to the fact that she was responding to the police asking the same questions 20 times over).

That 'vicious, dumb, and reactionary' that R65 describes is the crux of the story rather than the condescending performance by the imported Hollywood diva.

The documentaries on Youtube are much more informative about poor Lindy Chamberlain than this confected movie with its condescending imported Hollywood diva.

[quote] its condescending imported Hollywood diva.

That’s harsh.

I love it!

this was the year there was a three way tie for Best Actress at the Golden Globes.

Meryl wasn't one of the three. She and Christine Lahti had to sit there in the audience dejected.

I remember there was a small brouhaha about Streep being cast, as an American in an Australian story. But then Fred had a hardon for her after they did Plenty together. The only Oz actress I can think that had international success at the time is Judy Davis and I can't see Judy in the part. But I could be underestimating her because I much prefer Judy to Meryl as an actress.

Why was it called Evil Angels in some places? That seems like an odd title for it.

that is the name of the source book.

^ The source book alluded to the Christian belief in redemption, the promise of deliverance from sin and bondage, but gives it a secular application, in the attempt to see justice done, and especially to obtain Lindy Chamberlain’s release from prison.

Yes before the book came out the general opinion was that Lindy had killed her daughter.

The movie was an adaptation of the book by John Bryson, which was originally published as "Evil Angels":

"This identify reprises a theme sounded in the opening, for Bryson begins his story now not with the family reaching Uluru, and even surroundings out for Central Australia, but in Pennsylvania in 1844, on a night time when Seventh-Day Adventists had predicted the Second Coming of Christ would occur. The failure of that expectation introduced forth what one of their leaders referred to as 'the exulting, sneering triumph of evil angels'. That episode, known to Adventists as 'the Great Disappointment', sets a tone of depression for the Australian story of injustice that follows. Biblical quotations are sprinkled during the e-book, spoken by way of the participants of the church, or used as images by Bryson. Faith tested by antagonistic cases in the first case; religion juxtaposed with skepticism in the second."

I wonder if the casting was to take advantage of the Australian government's 10BA system. In the 1980s, private financing increased as a result of tax incentives for Australian-made film and television productions. Division 10BA (1981) of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 allowed investors a 150% tax concession on their investment at risk. There were a slew of international actors imported for Australian films, granted most of them were second-rate or has-beens.

[quote] I don't understand why that 10BA system was discontinued.

Come see us at the Bronze tomorrow night!

Beautiful, haunting score by Bruce Smeaton (who also scored Plenty, the other Fred Schepisi directed film starring M and Sam Neill).

[quote] Why was it called Evil Angels in some places? That seems like an odd title for it.

A lot of the prejudice against Lindy Chamberlain stemmed from the fact that people were suspicious of her religion, the Seventh-Day Adventists, and it was thought she had sacrificed baby Azaria as part of an evil cult ritual.

Also, the site of the disappearance, Uluru (then called Ayers Rock), is noted to be sacred to the local Anangu (aboriginal) people.

I wonder what the Seventh-Day Adventist religion has in common with the Anangu religion.

Meryl Streep as Lindy Chamberlain in Evil Angels and Kylie Minogue as Petra von Kant in Bio-Dome are two of the greatest representations of Australians in cinema.

I bought the 2004 miniseries starring Miranda Otto years ago out of curiosity but never got around to watching it.

It was weird that Shitley, Siggy and Jodie all tied for the Globe and Meryl's superior performance ignored. Meryl did win Cannes, NYCFC and Australia's Best Actress award.

Shitley musta been sore, becoming the first GG Drama winner not to get an Oscar nom.

I think Dangerous Liaisons had a very late release, hence why no Glenn.

Lindy' s hair...a mushroom cut to beat all mushroom cuts. Not flattering to groom yourself like a vegetable

Googling pictures of Lindy show how much of her wardrobe made it into the film. I remember M sporting this unflattering number.

She now favors bright bold prints.

^ The young Lindy Chamberlain was a petite woman (whose face reminded me of Judy Garland's).

But that imported Hollywood diva was a big boned woman with a problematic nose and jaw. The diva had to wear that large mushroom hair-do (R86) to minimise her big nose and jaw.

Critical people say that Lindy Chamberlain was a naive, simple-minded, uneducated member of a Christian sect. But that imported Hollywood diva turned her into a risible caricature.

Did Meryl fuck Sam Neill during the making of this film? She had a reputation for sleeping with all her co-stars.

Judy Davis has a tendency to accentuate her characters' neurotic sides, so she would need to rein that in to play Lindy.

[quote] Judy Davis

Yes, it would be painful for her to restrain her usual scenery-chewing habits but her small stature makes her a better match than that statuesque, large-featured, imported Hollywood diva.

Davis doesn't chew scenery all the time, though she certainly does in the Ryan Murphy crap she's been in lately. But that material invites and even needs that kind of acting to mask the threadbare, overhyped material.

I thought she was marvelous and pitch perfect in films like A PASSAGE TO INDIA, HUSBANDS AND WIVES, IMPROMPTU, HIGH TIDE, THE REF, and the little seen SWIMMING UPSTREAM.

R93 that may be the first time anyone referred to M as statuesque

Judy has done accents. After all she is Australian and has worked a lot in America, and has also done English and a German one in Kangaroo. But I still can't imagine her doing Lindy's voice. She just seems too urban. Perhaps Meryl could do it because she is more like a blank canvas who takes on the exteriors of a character.

Deborah Furness had a cameo as a reporter.

Looking over the cast it must have tickled Meryl that there is a featured extra named Charles Dance.

R17 Sam Neill is very active on Twitter. He's a lot of fun, and has a wonderful sense of humor.

So apparently the dingo really DID take the baby. It took how many years to figure that out?

Sam Neill recently narrated a docuseries about the Chamberlain case.

The recent authorised 40 year anniversary doco (which isn't on Youtube, unfortunately) says much blame should be given to this man (below).

He was anxious to blame Lindy and not discourage potential tourists to this relatively-unattractive, and unpleasant hot, arid part of the nation.

R36 I remember that movie, it was exploitative and pretty sordid, and presented the "what if she did it" version of Lindy as a scheming witch. It was also a ratings bonanza. I think that movie did more to harm her reputation than anything that happened in the courthouse. People were calling for the death penalty the morning after that movie aired.

The Sam Neill produced (and narrated) documentary is currently on YouTube.

The actress was a little too good in the 1983 TV movie. The husband was played by the presenter of the children's show Playschool, John Hamblin, who looked almost exactly like the real husband.

I cannot remember who the actress was, but it was heartbreaking when they portrayed Lindy as the victim, but they then showed Lindy killing Azaria with surgical scissors in the other scenario, cleaning up the mess, damaging the baby jumper to look like it was a dingo attack. All in the space of five minutes, and then returning to the campsite as if nothing happened and acting out the whole dingo scenario. I don't think the movie even bothered to come up with a plausible explanation of why she did it, other than she was some kind of devil worshipper.

I know many people are minboggingly stupid, but having read the prosecution's theory, I can't understand how it wasn't laughed out of court.

The prosecution didn't want to kill the Tourist Industry.

The embodiment of weird church lady dressing. I believe she sewed her own clothes, which was in the movie. Even for early 1980s the hair and clothes were appallingly bad.

I think another thing that worked against the Chamberlains's story was that dingoes had never killed a human baby before.

which is why I guess they thought it was ok to leave the baby by herself though I seem to recall the brother was there too.

[quote]Even for early 1980s the hair and clothes were appallingly bad.

You can still buy clothing every bit as hideous as that in Australia. Supre anyone?

only on Datalounge r90.

The biography of her "Her, Again" details the lengths she went to to fend off Jack Nicholdon'd advances.

(banned from her hotel floor in Heartburn, furious when he tricked her into a "date" at Chasten's by saying the whole cast was coming and then showing up alone.

Meryl and Lindy at around the 54:00 minute mark.

Fuck, Sam Neill was hot.

[quote] Meryl and Lindy at around the 54:00 minute mark

Meryl's so big and and Lindy's so small.

I thought this authorised doco was good and thorough.

But it didn't want to dwell on their religion. Nor did it give any insight on why the once-pretty Michael divorced before he died so soon.

M should have won for this

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