AustLit

'With rising international tensions in the Indo-Pacific, a brilliant and eclectic team of U.S. NCIS agents and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) are grafted into a multinational taskforce to keep naval crimes in check in the most contested patch of ocean on the planet. Our team of Americans and Aussies must quickly learn to trust each other, overcoming and harnessing their differences to solve each case. Welcome to NCIS: SYDNEY.'

Source: CBS Studios.

'When Penny Anderson (Claire van der Boom) returns to her childhood home just in time for the Appleton Show and its ‘world famous’ potato race, she is outraged that the men’s first prize pays out $2,000 and the winning woman’s prize is only $200!  Determined to right this wrong, she unleashes a cultural war the likes never seen in sleepy Appleton - pitting family against family, sister against sister and potato racer against potato racer.'

Source: Screen Australia.

When a British politician's teenage daughter is found dead in Sydney Harbour, a British and Australian detective team combine forces to solve a mystery with political consequences.

Source: Screen Australia, IF magazine.

Frank is drawn to Vanuatu by a summons from his brother Charlie but, arriving to find Charlie dead, he is drawn into the orbit of his brother's partner Viv and Viv's unhappy wife.

American revival of the 1966 television program, but filmed in Australia (largely in Queensland), and making extensive use of Australian directors and script-writers: eight of the twenty-two writers and five of the nine directors are Australian. As with the earlier version (and the later film incarnations), the program made extensive use of high-tech gadgetry that often crossed the line from science into science fiction.

'Just as Mick Dundee is adjusting to his new surroundings in New York, he and his girlfriend, Sue, find themselves up against a gang of Columbian drug dealers. Dundee evens the odds by leading them into the rugged Australian outback where they get a fast, funny and deadly lesson in wilderness survival.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 11/4/2014)

When the sailing ship United World is almost sunk by a hurricane, the forty teenagers who are sailing in her scramble for the lifeboats, but five are overlooked in the general panic. Along with the ship, they are driven into the lagoon of a mysterious island, Tambu. Here, they find a lost civilisation: the descendants of settlers originally headed for New Holland, who still live an eighteenth-century lifestyle. But they are under the domination of the mysterious Q, a seemingly immortal being who allegedly prolongs his life with the aid of a blue weed obtained from a nearby island, Malo. The five children, with the assistance of the Quinns, a local family, seek to avoid the malevolence of Q, who fears they are a threat to his domination of the island.

The Lost Islands was another production from New Zealand-born Roger Mirams, who was also responsible for such Australian television programs as The Terrific Adventures of the Terrible Ten, The Magic Boomerang, The Adventures of the Seaspray, and Spyforce.

Series exploring the covert activities behind Japanese lines of covert operatives working from a secret headquarters in Sydney.

According to Don Storey, in his Classic Australian Television, Mirams determined not to dwell on Japanese treatment of prisoners of war nor to show the Australians as incorruptible heroes, but did intend to counter the idea that the war was won entirely by American soldiers.

According to Storey,

Mirams could only provide money for the pilot. Each episode cost approximately $23,000 for a return of only $18,000, which over 42 episodes amounted to a loss of almost a quarter of a million dollars. At one stage cash flow became so tight that Thompson and Sumner went 'on strike' until they got paid. To cover his debts Mirams sold his rights in the series to Paramount Pictures. Consequently, Mirams made nothing from the show despite excellent overseas sales.

Albert Moran, in his Guide to Australian Television Series, notes of script-writer Ron McLean that 'McLean was never one to get precious about originality and Spyforce cheerfully plundered such stories as Callan, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, the James Bond stories and The Bridge on the River Kwai for many of its narratives.'

Storey sums up Spyforce as follows: 'The show improved as it went on - the episodes became tighter and faster, and the directing proved more imaginative. The lead cast gave excellent performances, and the special effects got better - all testimony to the short-cuts and improvisation which the series is legendary for.'

'A woman seeks relief from married boredom by keeping a sewing machine repairman in her attic.'

Source: British Film Institute (http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/26308). (Sighted: 9/9/2013)

Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of a French novel, which follows an acrophobic former detective who is unwittingly drawn into a friend's plan to murder his wife and claim it as suicide.

Comic crime musical.

An aspiring actress is mistaken for a gangster's moll when the gangster backing her latest show is found dead in her apartment.

A freighter captain picks up an abandoned baby boy and hires a young woman masquerading as a missionary's daughter to care for him. But their relationship is tested when, back in port, an investigation into a shipboard assault on the woman uncovers her questionable past.

'Trying to protect a woman from her angry husband, the hero accidentally kills him. Convicted of murder, he escapes from prison and sets out to clear himself.'

Source: British Film Institute (http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/421712). (Sighted: 11/9/2013)

A contemporary review in an Australian newspaper notes that the film stars Clive Brook as 'as Frank Gregory, a man on a dangerous commission in Africa, who loves his beautiful wife, Tania, despite her repeated infidelity, until he sees his brother is about to succumb to her wiles, and then all the primal instincts in the man are aroused.'

Source:

'A Dangerous Woman', Brisbane Courier, 26 July 1929, p.20.