Guy Hastings

Barney O'Hara (Will Mahoney) and his young daughter Pat (Jean Hatton) tour the carnival circuit with a side show act, but when Pat is asked to sing at a party being given by a wealthy land-owner, her voice fails.

Two brothers, Bill and Wally Winter, become infatuated with a gold digger, Nina Bellamy. She persuades them to ask their wealthy father, Sir James, for ₤10,000 so Bill can produce a stage show and Wally a movie, both starring Nina. Sir James discovers the truth about Nina and gives his son the money, provided they leave town in secret for one month to write their shows and that they only use new talent.

Hal Wayne (Norman Shepherd) is a bank clerk turned thief on the run. He hijacks a plane, which crashes in a remote mountain location. The survivors' hopes of rescue soon fade, and they try to ration their remaining supplies.

After being fired from his job at a grocer, George, gets a job as a stableboy at a local stud farm run by the Fleming family. He befriends the horse Hotspur who is a favourite to win the Melbourne Cup, and develops a strong whistle which is used to make the horse run fast.

Attending a reunion, two Australian ex-servicemen reminisce about their exploits in France during WW1. These include lying in a field hospital where they feigned deafness to extend their recuperation, stealing jars of rum from the Quartermaster and inventing an elaborate ruse to hide them and finally, the night before returning to the front relaxing in a French café where romance blossoms between the soldier and waitress as told through the song 'Mademoiselle from Armentieres'.

'Hero Of The Dardanelles' charts the fortunes of Will Brown (Guy Hastings) who answers his nation's call to do his duty. While only one third of the original film survives, it is a significant fragment of Australia's film heritage - not least for its inclusion of real troops and a real training camp at Liverpool, NSW and an elaborate re-enactment of the Gallipoli landings staged at Tamarama Bay. So convincing was the re-enactment that within a decade of 'Hero's' release, the landing sequence was being used erroneously as actuality. A hit with home-front audiences, whose appetite for heroic figures was yet to be sobered by the harsh realities of a protracted and bloody conflict, the film's anti-pacifist stance and clear messages to women about their duty to their own menfolk, provide valuable depictions of political currents of the day. Reconstructed in 2005, only 22 minutes of the original 44-minute production survive today.