For those of us fretting about how Heath Ledger will portray Ned Kelly to the world in the upcoming blockbuster film, the recent bushranger film festival with the particularly cumbersome name, Iron Helmets, Smoking Guns: The making of the Australian bushranger myth, helped to put our minds to rest… somewhat.

A seemingly ancient screening on the opening night of the excellent festival, Stringybark Massacre (1960), while oozing nostalgia, showed just how far the film industry has come in the past 50 years.

While director Gregor Jordan appears to have used a fair amount of creative licence in the latest $30 million movie, which will premiere on March 27, the result couldn’t possibly offer as much cringe value as the unclassic Stringybark Massacre.

The six-minute film was a pilot for an intended feature film that never saw the light of day. It’s no wonder either. No movie exec worth his salt would have wasted his time sitting through the excruciating 360 seconds.

The first sign that the film would be an anti-climax came in the introduction footage, which showed Ned sizing up to the camera in shoddy looking armour that had been scraped for dramatic effect. The helmet looked more like a rusty old waste-paper bin with it’s bottom cut out, and would have struggled to keep the wind out let alone police bullets.

Filmed on the property of popular radio personality ‘Smoky’ Dawson’s somewhere in country Victoria, it contained zombie-like dialogue from ‘actors’ – loosely-termed – who looked like they were doing the whole thing under sufferance. There were also historical inaccuracies such as the running gunfight between Ned and Sergeant Kennedy being reduced to one shot – the one that mortally wounded the brave officer.

The lowlight, or comic climax (whichever way you look at it), came during a scene involving Ned and the boys as they plotted their approach to the police camp. Ned, who donned a greyish, moth-eaten beard, was about 50-odd and looked more like Dan’s dad than his brother. (It’s little wonder the saying “old Ned” has persisted for so long.) The feared outlaw, who was revered for his strength sand athleticism, was so immobile that he looked like he was recovering from a 10-day bender.

The promotional brochure said that the director, Gary Shead, was widely-regarded for employing ‘avante-garde’ (to the layman, modern or experimental) film-making techniques. He was certainly experimental in this instance. It’s like he said: “Let’s do something really different; let’s make a film that no-one will want to watch.” Having said that, it was still entertaining, albeit for mainly the wrong reasons.

Liberties will no doubt be taken with the truth in the soon-to-be-released Ned movie. Heath and the boys won’t be wearing hats as almost everyone, particularly country folk, did back then, and, of course, there will be plot changes that conflict with the accepted history. Such as the love interest played by Heath’s real-life lover Naomi Watts.

But Jordan’s Ned Kelly should, by and large, be a film for us to be proud of. After all, our Ned will be on the big screen, preaching the kind of beliefs that were suppressed by authorities during his own lifetime. And let’s not forget that it will be a case of Australia’s greatest icon being portrayed by one of Australia’s best leading men.

It looks like Ned will receive a similarly heroic and fiercely patriotic treatment to Mel Gibson’s William Wallace in Braveheart and Liam Neeson’s Michael Collins in the movie of the same name. And so he should.

Now that’s something to look forward to… and rest easy about.