Diggers is a 1931 Australian comedy film produced and directed by F. W. Thring starring popular stage comedian Pat Hanna.
The original stage show consisted of the same reunion dinner and three flashback episodes, but in a different structure – it started with the attempt to steal rum, then dealt with the waitress romance, and finished with the hospital sketch.
These changes annoyed Hanna, who decided to form his own production company to make his follow up films, Diggers in Blighty (1933) and Waltzing Matilda (1933).
[14] In 1938 Hanna estimated the film had earned between £20,000 and £30,000.,[3] The movie was also released in England where it achieved 400 bookings, less successful than Thring's later His Royal Highness.
[15] Thring's biographer Peter Fitzpatrick later wrote that: Diggers is driven... by three things that made Hanna's concert parties a hit: the rapport between Chic, long and lean as the proverbial pull-through, and Joe, his little mate, as they battle authority in all its forms; George Moon's genius for physical comedy; and, above all, a delight in verbal gags built on the intrinsic slipperiness of language, especially as used by Chic and Joe.