BREAKER MORANT 43
executing Wallace’s wife, thus providing Wallace with a deeply personal motive
for rebelling against them. This is pure fiction; there is no rec ord of Wallace hav-
ing been married. Even Mel Gibson’s physiognomy and age are wrong. Wallace
was reputed to have been tall (perhaps 6'5") and heavi ly muscled. He would have
been in his late twenties to mid- thirties during the uprising against England. Stand-
ing a trim 5'11" and 38 years of age at the time of filming, Mel Gibson was a half-
foot shorter than Wallace, much slighter of build, and somewhat older. The movie’s
depiction of the Battle of Stirling Bridge is also wildly inaccurate, mainly because it
features no bridge— the crucial tactical fulcrum that enabled the Scots to cut off half
the En glish Army and slaughter those enemy troops that made it across the bridge.
Woad, the blue war paint prominently displayed in the film’s battle scenes, had not
been used by Scottish warriors since the end of the Roman era, that is, some
800 years before the events depicted in the film. The movie depicts several clans
that comprise Wallace’s army as dressed alike in their representative clan tartans,
but the use of distinctive kilts and tartan patterns did not emerge until the Victorian
era, 600 years later. Furthermore, many Scots were offended by the film’s portrayal
of Robert the Bruce, who is also considered a national hero.
Breaker Morant (1980)
Synopsis
Breaker Morant is an Australian war film directed by Bruce Beresford, who also
co- wrote the screenplay. Based on Kenneth G. Ross’s eponymous play (1978), the
film dramatizes the 1902 court martial of Lts. Harry Morant, Peter Handcock, and
George Witton, Australians serving in the British Army during the Second Anglo-
Boer War accused of murdering captured enemy combatants and an unarmed civil-
ian in the Northern Transvaal.
Background
Since his court- martial and execution by the British for alleged war crimes com-
mitted during the Boer War, Harry “Breaker” Harbord Morant (1864–1902) has
been an Australian folk hero rivaling the legendary bushranger, Ned Kelly. Morant’s
legend was firmly established in 1907 by Scapegoats of the Empire, an exculpatory
tome written by his surviving co- defendant, George Witton (1874–1942). In the
1970s the legend was revived in a small way by writer Kit Denton with a novel
based on Morant’s life entitled The Breaker (1973) and by neophyte filmmaker Frank
Shields’ low- budget documentary, also entitled The Breaker (1974). Of greater cul-
tural impact in Australia was Breaker Morant, a two- act play by Kenneth G. Ross
that ran at the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne in 1978 and was a critical and
commercial success, so much so that Ross turned his play script into a screenplay.
As film historian Graham Daseler notes, filmmaker Bruce Beresford (The Getting of
Wisdom) “had two scripts to work from. One was Ross’s play, the other a screen-
play by David Stevens and Jonathan Hardy. Beresford scrapped both, considering
them each too generous to the defendants, and traveled to the Imperial War Museum