TV Cream's A-Z of films (original) (raw)

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OZ
"Hard yakka and hard tucker!"

Australian films - all Victoria Bitter-fuelled, Ayres Rock-showcasing, mullet-haired, screamingly camp Guy Pearce extravaganzas, right mate? Well, no. And, conversely, yes. Come with us if you will on a whistlestop tour of the contradictory melting pot that is, or rather was, pre-Hogan Ocker cinema.

The early days of Aussie cinema are dominated - at least, as far as our bitty knowledge is concerned - by one John William Goffage, better known to the continent and the world as the Australian Cary Grant, Chips Rafferty. If you see an Australian film made between the outbreak of WWII and the mid-'60s, chances are there'll be a fair dinkum, rugged-but-loveable Aussie in there, not necessarily in shorts and bush hat, played by Chips. A key '40s film for the blockbusting bludger is THE OVERLANDERS, an Ealing production if you please, with Rafferty overseeing the historic movement of thousands of cattle across the Northern Territories to Queensland to shore up the country's supplies in the face of Japanese invasion. The no probs persona is here in excelsis, with Rafferty rounding up his crew in none-more-laid-back style (Rafferty: "Hey Jacky, fancy a thousand mile trek to Queensland?" Aborigine Jacky: "'Ow long yer gonna be?" Chips: "About three years." Jacky: "Right, I'll tell the wife. Back in ten minutes.") although the film is dated by Rafferty's dreams of leaving Australia for the brave new world of... the Soviet Union ("Moscow here I come!") There's more of a roguish tinge to the bloke in proto-Children's Film Foundation favourite BUSH CHRISTMAS, with two fish-out-of-water children using bush survival skills to track down Rafferty's gang of horse rustlers.

The isolation felt by new arrivals in the wide open spaces of the New World was a major theme for the subsequent wave of immigration-based dramas. THE SUNDOWNERS saw Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr take up the itinerant sheep-shearing life with Peter Ustinov, under the aegis of no-nonsense shearing chief (Rafferty again). The contrast between a clean slate land of opportunity and an empty, rootless existence was the order of the day here, the bucolic excitement of sheep-shearing contests and games of two-up being small compensation for the lack of a real home. The style of this film - as close to documentary as mainstream Hollywood got in those days, with plenty of natural history footage of Oz's bizarro nature thrown in - was a fittingly downbeat one, and one that would almost become the default pastoral style for many a 'pomme in purgatory' film to come.

Post-Peeping Tom brush-off, the itinerant Michael Powell fetched up in Sydney to create - what else? An Italian neo-realist romantic comedy.THEY'RE A WEIRD MOB is as great as it is bizarre - an Italian journalist emigrates to the you beaut country to become a journalist at the behest of his cousin, only to find the promised job waiting for him has vanished, as has the cousin, and he's left with debts that have to be met by taking gruelling work on a baking hot construction site - cue a strange and wonderful silent sequence of frenzied earth digging in full suit, tie and hat, and a slow-mo, Kurosawa-style exhausted collapse. Romance ensues with one of his cousin's creditors, who gradually falls in love with him, though her cantankerous, dagophobe dad - played by, natch, the man Chips - proves a tougher hurdle. It's a brilliant film, setting the 'fair go' idealism of the country against its latent xenophobic streak to brilliant effect, and broke box office records for a native film in 1966.

Considerably less delicate in nature were the two Barry McKenzie films created by Barry Humphries after the comic strip character he'd invented for Private Eye became incredibly popular in his homeland. Barry Crocker, warbler of the Neighbours theme of course, played the titular chunderhound, and the first film, THE ADVENTURES OF BARRY MCKENZIE, with the head cobber all over Earl's Court like a dose of crabs, insulting the pommes and causing havoc at Television Centre, is knowingly over the top obscenity. Humphries crops up as both Sir Les Patterson and McKenzie's "auntie" Edna, and the likes of Spike Milligan, Peter Cook, Dennis Price, Julie Covington, Joan Bakewell, Willie Rushton, Russell Davies and an Edna-ennobling cameo from Prime Minister Gough Whitlam thicken the cast. The sequel, BARRY MCKENZIE HOLDS HIS OWN, moves to Paris, where evil Transylvanians, under the aegis of a marvellously bloodless Donald Pleasance, kidnap Edna, assuming her to be the Queen, and the cameo roll call features John Le Mesurier, Roy Kinnear, Don Spencer and Clive James. Staying with the seamier side of things, mention should go to the notorious film version of Australia's legendary "saucy soap" NUMBER 96, which was shot in under a fortnight on 16mm film on a budget of practically nothing, takes in bikers, bondage, rape and ruby wedding celebrations, and features Tom 'Lou Carpenter' Oliver, who apparently also appears in Summer Holiday at one point. Critics and cultural custodians decried these efforts, but taking around a million Australian dollars apiece, they can lay a fair claim to having rejuvenated a then-ailing national film industry.

Tourism in the opposite direction to Barry McKenzie's was on hand with Nicolas Roeg's fragmented outback Agutter meanderer WALKABOUT, which similarly ripped into the then just about still repressively buttoned-down nature of middle-class Australian life by confronting a suicidal businessman's plummy children (and, latterly, some equally plummy geologists) with both aboriginal and small town mores, although the landscape photography probably made more of an impact than the culture clash invective could hope to (incidentally, the arrival of archaeologists in the outback was pre-empted by the rotten Burt Reynolds starrer **SKULLDUGGERY,**which also featured Chips Rafferty, living missing links, and Wilfrid Hyde-White as a racist South African judge). A similarly lyrical film, STORM BOY, surfaced later in the '70s, following the mute adventures of about a young boy in remote south Oz, an aborigine called Fingerbone Bill and an orphaned pelican called Mr Percival. A companion film, BLUE FIN, followed, with the same writer and boy star, this time covering family life (with dad played by Hardy Kruger!) in a fishing community, and the effects of a spectacularly-filmed storm at sea. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Alan Rothwell on Picture Box, at least one of these visually gorgeous films is imprinted on the memories of an entire generation of Poms.

By the '70s, of course, Australia was the number one destination for British ex-pats. OUTBACK saw Brit teacher Donald Pleasence stranded in The Yabba, a remote scrub wilderness where sun, chronic boredom and dumb drunken insolence are the inescapable order of the day, the week, and the year. The Australian tourist board didn't take kindly to this warts-and-more-warts protrayal (which incidentally was Chips' last film), and several counter-message films were pushed through, mainly in a lighter, more continent-promoting mood, such as SUNSTRUCK, a whimsically romantic tale of rather more ebullient and eager teacher Harry Secombe upping sticks to Oz for sun, surf and Sheilas, but finding himself in an outback girls' school instead. Still, it all turned out all right in the end (what would you expect from a film made by Immigrant Productions?) Michael Powell was still at it, meanwhile, with AGE OF CONSENT, in which globetrotting aussie artist James Mason finally returns home, and hooks up with dodgy old pal Jack MacGowran and very young muse Helen Mirren on remote Dunk Island. Meanwhile Walter Chiari, the journo from WIERD MOB, became a down under-bound Italian monk relocating his vineyard for wine comedy SQUEEZE A FLOWER, featuring a host of latterly big Aussie names as well as Dave Allen. Other oddness around this period included OZ, which retold the Wizard of... story as the tale of a lost groupie catapulted into a fantasy Australia in search of Bowie-esque singer The Wizard, aided by a surfie, a mechanic and a biker (in place of the scarecrow, tin man and lion respectively), and Dennis Hopper incarnated Irish bushranger Daniel Morgan in MAD DOG MORGAN.

By the mid '70s a generation of indigenous film makers were examining aspects of the country beyond landscapes and liquid yodelling. First out of the traps, and most prominent, was Peter Weir, who'd graduated from bizarre black-and-white shorts like HOMESDALE (a sort of Eraserhead meets Round the Twist black comedy) to the immensely enjoyable low-budget sci-fi romp THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS, in which the inhabitants of a surreally quaint outback town (as with yer Melbourne suburbs, still stuck in the Victorian era, though in this case they even wear bonnets, stovepipe hats and entertain themselves with mind-numbingly dull tea dances) who engineer accidents for passing cars to keep their community ticking over, until youngsters in souped-up custom cars (including a bondage VW beetle) literally start tearing the town apart. It's witty, knockabout stuff - basically an extended student film, in the best sense of the phrase. More Victorian types get it in the neck in Weir's follow-up, the far more conventional and respectedPICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, based on a not-really-all-that-true story of a bunch of schoolgirls disappearing in mysterious circumstances during the titular outing. Again, it's all about repressed Old World values getting the boot from the untameable wilderness of the new country. A theme would appear to be developing.

Fellow New Waver Bruce Beresford, who had directed the two Barry McKenzie films (and also called the shots for Humphries-starring glam rock showcase Side by Side, for details of which see under G) turned his camera on the emergent, liberalised middle classes in DON'S PARTY, an adaptation of a play set at a raucous suburban party on the night of the 1969 election. The coming change in political and social climate is offset with the unreconstructed behaviour of the party guests, predating (and going much further than) Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party in its ruthless mockery of wayward suburbia. It couldn't be more of a contrast with Beresford's later**'BREAKER' MORANT,** a sober Boer War period piece with Australian Lieutenants including Edward Woodward and Bryan Brown being court martialled as scapegoats for maltreatment of PoWs. Terence Donovan, Ray 'Alf' Meagher and the almost-as-ubiquitous-as-Chips Charles 'Bud' Tingwell are among a superb cast, and for historical veracity knocks Weir's Mel Gibson-tainted Anzac tribute GALLIPOLI, released the following year, into a cocked hat. Wildly changing tack yet again, Beresford then served up PUBERTY BLUES, a teen movie that made its American counterparts look like Enid Blyton, all big hair, surfing, "fancy a root?" chat-up lines and beach alcoholism, simultaneously trashily camp and incredibly grim.

Also around at that time was George Miller, who graduated from spoofy student short VIOLENCE IN THE CINEMA to become Oz's very own high octane George Lucas, remaking MAD MAX repeatedly until the awful Vidal Sassoon campery of Beyond t'Thunderdome killed it stone dead. Or how about David Stevens, who gave us semi-educational venereal disease comedy **THE CLINIC,**providing an early break for Mark Little in the process? Perhaps not. More appealing were the female directors who came along with the New Wave - Gillian Armstrong, after a decade of making quirky short films like SATDEE NIGHT, propelled Judy Davis and Sam Neill to world stardom with pleasant if slightly static feminist period drama MY BRILLIANT CAREER, while Jane Campion came up with the likeable black-and-white short **A GIRL'S OWN STORY,**an early '60s tale of coming of age and Beatles fandom (a format retrodden in useless early '90s Dannii Minogue vehicle SECRETS), before - hey! - putting the fun into dysfunctional with weirdo sister curio SWEETIE, and moving on to the stultifying pretension of THE PIANO. But never mind that, more deserving of space is unsung heroine Nadia Tass, director of the excellent 1986 caper comedy MALCOLM. An exercise in doing "quirky" without becoming a pain in the arse, Malcolm takes a plot that could easily nosedive into sentiment - reclusive, borderline-autistic bloke with a talent for making gadgets falls in with a lowlife crim and his girlfriend, and helps them with a robbery - but treats it in exactly the right head-on manner, like an Australian Ealing comedy, for want of a better comparison. The dialogue is brazen, the gags sound, and the gadgets, from Malcolm's personal tram to the split-in-two getaway car to the robot ashtrays, are ace. The only thing that dates it is the Penguin Cafe Orchestra soundtrack, which was really lovely once, before it appeared on every mobile phone advert ever, honest.

Then came Paul Hogan, and the big New Wave names went to Hollywood, with mixed results. Weir more or less kept his eye on the ball, and Miller oversaw The Witches of Eastwick, but Gillian Armstrong made the notorious cock-up that was Charlotte Gray, and Bruce Beresford did Driving Miss Daisy, for Gawd's sake. As for back home, the rest is more or less well-recorded history as the late '80s saw a veritable international explosion in daft Australian fare - Yahoo Serious' YOUNG EINSTEIN (actually far more watchable and less dumb than you'd expect), THE DELINQUENTS (every bit as insipid and inept as you'd expect), last gasp of old school Ockerdom LES PATTERSON SAVES THE WORLD (directed by the *other* George Miller, of Anzacs and Man From Snowy River fame) and sundry other masterpieces such as DOGS IN SPACE(Michael Hutchence and pals swear and sleep around in a squat to an Iggy Pop soundtrack) and THE MARSUPIALS: THE HOWLING III (record-breakingly bad transplantation of the werewolf franchise down under, with added Dame Edna), before we're into blockbusting Muriel's Wedding/Priscilla/P**n* territory. Not that anyone from Britain is in much of a position to comment on the state of the Australian film industry, mind. Ahem.

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