Came a Hot Friday
The nick-name of ''The Tainuia Kid'' (Billy T. James) was ''The Kid'' which was also the name the character was billed under during the film's closing credits roll. In the picture's press kit, the character is referred to as ''Tainuia Kid''.,The brand of green plastic roofing visible above the saxophonist's balcony was not in use in the 1940s.,Wes Pennington: [singing while urinating into a river] Pour the devil's poison into God's cleansing river/It's of no further use to man when it's filtered through the liver!,Featured in Century of Cinema: Cinema of Unease: A Personal Journey by Sam Neill (1995),This is an an enjoyable, pleasant, simple romp through the New Zealand country side and bush in the 1940s; Marshall Napier steals the show as the bad guy - Billy T James would have done, for his eccentric performance as the Tainui Kid, but you need subtitles to understand him. The script is crisp and has some great one-liners but some of the acting is a little on the amateur side and Ian Mune's direction, as always, lacks any real spark. The quality of the story lifts the film above that. Incidentally, for the benefit of a previous poster, Billy T James, as the Tainui kid, is a Maori, not an 'Aboriginal' which is not a socially respectable term anyway. Aborigines are found in Australia, a couple of thousand miles away.,