Grant Tilly in Carry Me Back

Grant Tilly in Carry Me Back

We remember the versatile and inimitable Grant Tilly on the first anniversary of his death. Tilly is at his comedic best in Carry Me Back (1982), in which he plays a southern bloke trying creatively to smuggle his deceased father home from Wellington.

“A [...] comedy from John Reid, director of the popular Middle Age Spread, Carry Me Back has about it something of the flavour of the vintage Ealing comedies and shares with them an irreverence towards death. TK Donovan hasn’t left his South Island farm in ten years, and so his sons, Arthur and Jimmy, are surprised when the old man decides to join them on a trip to Wellington to watch the local team play in a football final. There’s a boozy crossing on the ferry, and then a successful game won by the local team. That night Arthur and Jimmy go out on the town, while old TK quickly tires of watching strippers and wanders off on his own. Next morning he is found dead in his motel bed and to their horror his sons discover in his will (which he always carried with him) that the farm will be left to the football club unless TK is buried on his beloved property - and the law won’t allow that unless he actually died on it.” - David Stratten, Sydney Film Festival

“Carry Me Back is always lovely to look at, sometimes very funny and occasionally awkwardly melodramatic. Above all, it is shot through (if I may use that expression) with local colour. The horseplay and the mateship of the country boys going to town for a Ranfurly Shield match are absolutely dinkum.” - Peter Harcourt, Sequence, October 1982.

Tilly was a prolific film, theatre and television actor over several decades, from the late 1960s through 2010. His roles ranged from a colonial minister in The Governor (1977), to an adulterous headmaster in Middle Age Spread (1979), to a paper-pusher in office sitcom Gliding On (1981 - 1985), to a German villain in Savage Islands (1983). He was also an innovative visual artist and theatre technician, and one of the founders of Wellington’s Circa Theatre.

Carry Me Back will screen at the Film Archive, Wellington. 7pm Wednesday through Friday, and 4.30pm Saturday, April 10 - 13.

Image Credit: Carry Me Back, 1982. Courtesy of the New Zealand Film Archive Ngā Kaitiaki O Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua.

ENDS

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