After the end of World War I, Australian soldier Jocko Wilson (Charles Laughton) admires the spirit of a destitute Belgian orphan who fights a larger boy.

When he receives orders to go home, he gets his friend Ginger Gaffney (Clyde Cook) to smuggle the pair aboard their ship.

Then, realizing he knows nothing about raising children, he proposes to his singer girlfriend Aggie Dawlins (Binnie Barnes).

When Nipper sees his reporter friend "Dusty" Rhodes (Stephen McNally), who had covered his fight, go off with Mary to ask her to marry him, he becomes furious and beats the man up.

He decides to leave without explanation, causing a rupture with Jocko, who had set up a match against the world champion after seeing that Nipper's shoulder has healed.

Mary's description of a recurring nightmare of the day her parents were killed (with Nipper absent from her dream) had set Aggie to investigating.

The film was based on a story by Mark Kelly and Bogart Rogers which was originally bought by MGM in May 1942 as a vehicle for Wallace Beery.

Lon Jones, an Australian journalist doing a lecture tour of the US, acted as technical adviser for life in Australia.

I am one of those unfortunate actors who have to depend solely on their dramatic ability to create a transition on the screen or stage.

"[4] A number of silent era film stars appeared in small roles in the movie, such as William Desmond, May McEvoy, Florence Turner, Lillian Rich, Barbara Bedford, and Helen Holmes.

Melbourne publishes a Sunday newspaper made up in American style, and Australians talk like Cockneys: but the film as a whole portrays Australians sympathetically to vast American audiences and also drives home the fact that the Commonwealth has actually suffered enemy violence.

His strenuous and, no doubt sincere, effort to impersonate something which is the very antithesis of his true personality is painful to behold."

The film is so badly off the scent In most respects that it is impossible not to be amused by it, provided that one can survive the irritations caused by its inaccuracies.

But there is a more serious aspect Perhaps the producérs made no effort to make this a film of types but audiences in other countries will no doubt be ready enough to accept these 'Australians" as authentic and charactersistic.

Charles Laughton, uncomfortably wrestling with a variety of unfamiliar accents, represents an Australian as a gambler, a confidence trickstet, a hard drinker, and a fellow whose window-dressing of tough talk cannot conceal the fact that he is at heart a childlike and maudlin sentlmentalist.

As no other film before it, "The Man From Down Under" cannot fail to shake Australian faith in Hollywood's ability to bring its local colour within the bounds of reasonable possibility.