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The Overlanders (Rank; Universal-International) is an Australian horse opera that has documentary force. In 1942, when Australia looked every day for a Jap invasion, the Australians decided to scorch their earth. The Northern Territory, some 520,000 square miles of land containing only 5,000 people and a million head of cattle, began to burn its houses, shoot its bullocks and head south.

Based on fact, The Overlanders is a hard-riding yarn about a drover who refused to shoot 1,000 head of cattle, decided to "overland" them across 1,600 miles of forbidding mountains and desert. The storytelling, acting and incidental romancing are not quite up to Hollywood Standards. But the jagged, weirdly beautiful landscapes are novel and interesting.

So is the thread of a story as it follows the overlanders in their struggles to get the. cattle safely past crocodiles, swollen rivers, poison weed, dry water holes, stampedes.

Undisputed star of this first feature film produced in Australia with British backing is a breezy, 6 ft. 6 in. ex-drover named Chips Rafferty, currently Australia's Gary Cooper.

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