On the Big Screen: MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015)

The word apocalypse comes from an ancient Greek word literally translated as "unveiling," which is why the New Testament book called the Apocalypse of John is identified in English as "Revelation." So while George Miller's Mad Max movies are routinely identified as post-apocalyptic movies, that's really a misnomer. They are apocalypses unto themselves, and the latest picture, finished thirty years after the last one, is no exception. Mel Gibson is too old to play Max now but Miller isn't too old to direct Mad Max movies. Like Kenji Fukasaku directing Battle Royale at age 70, Miller hasn't mellowed with age. To the contrary, Fury Road is like a second coming -- or a fourth, if you insist -- of a style of action, if not an entire style of filmmaking, that has too often in our time seemed smothered by CGI or other conventions that most likely make Miller's film look stranger to audiences today, who apparently prefer anything from Avengers 2 to Pitch Perfect 2. There's a lot going for action movies today, but Fury Road blows its contemporaries away, in great part because it self-evidently is not the kind of action-movie comfort food that prevails today, whether in Marvel movies, Fast and Furious films or the pixellated fantasyland of Peter Jackson. It does not come swaddled in jokes and relationships. A new Mad Max movie is not a family reunion of any sort, as Mel Gibson's absence makes clear. No fan service from George Miller, unless you count as an in-joke the new film's villain being played by the same actor who played the villain of the original movie. Instead, Miller believes in the old-fashioned sort of fan service, which consists of delivering the goods.

For the first time since Gravity I opted to see a film in 3D and this was a good choice. Miller gives us the old fashioned pleasure of objects being hurled out of the screen, albeit from nearly every conceivable direction and with more menacing speed than normal. He filmed at mountainous locations and massive sets that give Fury Road an epic if not biblical feel. If some shots hint at what Lawrence of Arabia would have looked like in 3D, the early scenes at Immortan Joe's citadel look like something Cecil B. DeMille would have done in 3D. Joe has made a mountain into his temple and the fount of his thralls' survival thanks to his control of an underground reservoir. He lets the water flow a few minutes at a time while the wretches fight for their portion, warning them not to get attached to the stuff, or else they'll resent its absence. Joe, a broken-down old man who covers a ruined mouth with a skull mask, but also an excellent driver, rules over whitefaced War Boys whom he fills with dreams of Valhalla and the blood of healthy victims to replace their diseased vital fluids. Max (Tom Hardy), found as usual in a bad way, finds himself reduced to the status of "blood bag" and hood ornament of Nux (Nicholas Hoult), a War Boy eager to prove himself and prove to himself that he is "awaited" in Joe's Valhalla. Hardy is either a profound ironist or simply accursed, for here is his next opportunity to put himself over with the multiplex audience after The Dark Knight Rises and again he's stuck with a mask, though only for the first third of the film this time. But if there's something weirdly self-effacing about Hardy, the mask is actually a smart way for Miller to ease the transition; it allows us to more gradually accustom ourselves to a Max who isn't Gibson. With the mask on, the man on the screen is neither Gibson nor Hardy but Mad Max in nearly ideal form.

The mask also forms part of the argument that Max, or Hardy, is eclipsed intentionally by the film's co-hero, the renegade Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). Furiosa has been the focus of some preposterous speculation or conspiracy mongering, with at least one website earning a lot of publicity for itself by accusing Miller of reviving his franchise only to force a feminist agenda down moviegoers' throats. Hearing about this before seeing the film, you might expect Fury Road to be a war of the sexes, with Max presumably a traitor to his. Rest easy, folks. Yes, Immortan Joe has multiple wives whom he treates as slaves and broodmares. But even this marks him as a sexist or misogynist when he can also make Furiosa, also an excellent driver, a trusted lieutenant with important responsibilities, though this proves to be a mistake. If anything, Theron's performance is a weak link of the film. She's a strong figure, certainly, but perhaps because Miller sees her as the film's co-hero Furiosa isn't as flamboyant a figure as the other denizens of the citadel and environs. Theron plays her as a laconic, understated figure, much as Hardy plays Max, with few if any of the eccentricities that seem otherwise to follow from civilization's collapse. The problem, I think, is that we meet her at the point of betraying Joe, liberating his wives, and redeeming herself, when she might have been a more compelling figure had we seen her actively collaborating with Joe -- if we saw why she feels a need to redeem herself. But that would require a separate picture -- which some have asked for -- without Max at its center. Beyond this, there's arguably some feminist agenda in the concept of the Green Place, a matriarchy from which Furiosa was taken as a child and to which she hopes to return with Joe's women, but if anything the film tells us that such a utopia is just as much a dead end as any other, and we need not assume that Miller recommends matriarchy as the future for Max's world.

As for who's the real hero, the answer's pretty simple. When during a point of despair Furiosa opts for escapism, lighting out for the territory through the desert, as far away from the citadel as possible, in the hope of finding something better at the other side, it's Max who tells her that "Hope is a mistake" if it leads you to run away from the problem in front of you. If Max has been a commitment-phobic figure throughout his series -- and here he seems more haunted than ever by horrific hallucinations of his lost family -- he's still the one who tells Furiosa to commit, to chose fight over flight. He points her toward the only practical solution: revolution. Joe has overextended his forces pursuing Furiosa and left his citadel undefended. If Furiosa's team -- which now includes a reformed Nux, disillusioned by failure and separation like a lone Borg -- makes a surprise end run back the way she came, through Joe's lines, she might capture the citadel almost singlehandedly.

If Fury Road has a theme, it's that civilization can be redeemed only by our giving freely of ourselves to others. At a crucial moment Max, formerly an involuntary bloodbag, offers his blood freely to a wounded comrade, while Nux, previously a parasite on Max's blood, is inspired to make a considerable sacrifice of his own. Furiosa finally becomes a full hero once convinced by Max to liberate the citadel rather than fend for herself in the desert.

But who needs a theme for Fury Road? The film needn't have a thought in its head to be one of the greatest action films ever. Here is a film that almost literally reinvents the wheel in spectacular fashion, restoring the action film to a gritty, visceral life that has been rendered away in recent years. No luddite, Miller has exploited CGI to amplify his typical effects, but the car and stunt based reality of it all is still obvious, as is the series' inventively idiosyncratic weirdness. Joe's fleet rolls to its own live soundtrack, complete with a monstrous speaker system on wheels with a flamethrowing guitar soloist whose final fate gives the film one of its funnies 3D gags. Miller has had ample time to imagine the road wars of his world and the weapons that might evolve. So now we see War Boys harpooning cars with explosive-tipped spears, and pole-mounted warriors who flank their quarry and plunge down to snatch captives or plunder before bouncing back upright. The visualization, the execution and editing are impeccable. If Buster Keaton had imagined an apocalypse, this is what it might have looked like. If the action film follows directly from Keaton's large-scale stunt films like The General, Fury Road honors that lineage and builds upon it. If in many ways it reminds me of something old, it also manages to make something new, an imagined future, look like something real -- or definitely more real than most movies. At the same time it feels more like a movie than most action movies have lately. And I don't know how long it's been since I've seen something as exhilarating on the big screen. I get it if some of you absolutely had to do Pitch Perfect this weekend, but if you love movies you owe it to yourself to see Fury Road on a big screen, if not in 3D, while you have a chance.

Wendigo Meets DAYBREAKERS (2010)

My friend Wendigo is entertained by ideas and concepts. If a movie takes a novel noteworthy approach in building a fictional world, whether intellectually or aesthetically, he's more likely to be forgiving of any shortcomings in narrative or direction. If he can take an idea away that he can ponder afterward, or if he can see where the creators are getting their ideas or how they're adapting or evolving them, he considers the time spent worth his while. It's sometimes enough for a movie to be interesting, especially if a vampire movie takes the vampire motif in a new direction.

Michael and Peter Spierig's Daybreakers is the kind of film where imagination redeems other creative flaws in Wendigo's eyes. Its drastically different approach to vampires takes the concept out of the realm of horror and into the uncomfortable domain of dystopian science fiction. For that reason, presumably, Lionsgate treated the movie like a hot potato, letting it sit on the shelf for two years before dumping it in theaters in January 2010. Like Let Me In later in that year, it was a vampire film that didn't cater to currently popular fantasies of vampirism, and that doomed it at the American box office. What's cool about being a vampire when the world's full of them, after all? So much for Daybreakers, but while the film has its problems, but it deserved a better fate.

The time is 2019, ten years after a random bat bite started a global pandemic that transformed the great majority of humans into vampires. While some people opted for suicide, most did not find this fate worse than death. By the time of the story, vampire is the new human. Bloodsucking has been normalized to an alarming degree as humanity's new condition created new opportunities for businesses (subwalk platforms for daytime pedestrian travel, digital screens to take the place of mirrors and windshields, etc.). What may surprise viewers is that Daybreakers is dystopian, not post-apocalyptic. Society hasn't collapsed into the clans of fantasy or all-against-all warfare. The normality of it all is really the most horrific element of the movie, making it something like an evil Hanna Barbera cartoon.

Apocalypse is in the cards, however, because the supply of uninfected humans, who are herded and farmed for blood in the film's most dystopian images, is inevitably running out. For big business, crisis equals opportunity, and the Bromley Marks pharmaceutical firm is in the race to develop an artificial blood substitute. Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is part of the team experimenting on substitutes, often with explosively bloody results. Ed has a personal motive to work hard. A reluctant vampire in the first place (he was turned by his military brother to save his life), he's been abstaining from human blood, just as society is starting to discover that forced abstention due to shortages can have dangerous consequences. Stay off the juice too long and you start mutating; Ed's ears start to get pointy, for instance. Things get worse if you get desperate and start drinking your own blood or another vampire's. Then you're on the short track to becoming a "subsider," one of the feral, batlike vampire underclass whose numbers are growing as shortages get worse. One interesting thing about Daybreakers is how "normal" most vampires are. While they can't see themselves in mirrors and are vulnerable to sunlight, they don't have super strength unless they turn into subsiders, and they seem to be on even terms with humans in fights, both sides resorting to weapons adapted to their strengths and weaknesses.

Subsiders, the lowest of the low among vampires (above), are the physically strongest as well, while normal vampires have to wear special clothes (below right) just to have a fighting chance against humans in the daytime.

When a traffic accident gives him a chance to rescue a band of fugitive humans from the vampire military, Ed is rewarded with an opportunity to meet an extraordinary person. Lionel "Elvis" Cormac (Willem Dafoe -- I said extraordinary, right?) is a former vampire. Through his own freak accident, Elvis learned that a cure for vampirism was possible.

T.C.B.

First you starve yourself like Ed has. Then you expose yourself to sunlight for a very limited time. The vampirism will literally burn off you in very painful fashion, and as long as you have some means of dousing the flames (Elvis was pitched through the windshield of his car and into a river) you'll be a new person. While steering clear of the military, including Ed's brother, the gang figures out a way to recreate the conditions of Elvis's cure in a more controlled environment. Ed subjects himself to an excruciating but successful treatment.

Once upon a time, Ed was scared by a little shaft of light. Look how brave he becomes!

You'd think a cure for vampirism would be the ideal resolution of the blood shortage issue, but some people, like Ed's boss (Sam Neill) like being vampires and the money they can make off vampirism. Daybreakers hammers home the point that greed is really the worst form of vampirism, and entrepreneurs the most dangerous vampires. Not even the discovery of a second cure mode (Elvis's purified blood cures Ed's brother) guarantees humanity's redemption as long as the alternative is wealth and power for someone else....

For almost the full length of the film, Frankie Dalton (Michael Dorman) is the only vampire who bites humans in the neck. Why is that?

In its portrait of a society unsustainably dependent on a finite resource, Daybreakers has some obvious contemporary relevance. Wendigo admires the depth of the Spierig's imagination, but he sees some holes in the concept. The crisis seems to come too suddenly, in his view, with no one having anticipated the crisis and taken steps beyond blood farming. Hadn't anyone thought of cloning humans? For my part, I thought that a vampire majority might resort to p.r. to redefine themselves as the "real" humans, while the actual human minority might get stuck with some dehumanizing nickname to make their exploitation easier. There are bigger holes in the narrative. For instance, a group of humans are traveling in a convoy toward a rendezvous with Elvis's band, but against all common sense, they travel at night, when they'd be most vulnerable to vampires. Wendigo also thought that the entire idea of gathering all the humans together was a dubious idea, since it'd allow them all to be taken in one fell swoop.

Somewhere past the halfway point, Daybreakers turns into a more conventional if not cliched action thriller with too many predictable plot twists. It also becomes more redundant, with a repetitive succession of vamp-on-vamp attacks to supposedly spread Cure No. 2. It becomes redundantly gory, too, as if the Spierigs needed to square up for a relative lack of it earlier. Once starving vampires tear into Sam Neill and other actors, the film comes closest to being a kind of horror film. Wendigo wasn't really bothered by the repetition, but felt that the actual effects, including a flying Neill head, left something to be desired. The various appearances of subsiders are handled better; they're scarier for the depths to which they've sunk than for how they look or act. The directors make a point of reminding us that the subsiders were all people once, though they're less successful with a subplot that takes the Neill character's daughter on a rapid arc from fugitive human to executed subsider.

There's a tragic grandeur to the fiery demise (above) of Charles Bromley's daughter, and a farcical fakeness to Charles's own undoing.

Wendigo approached this film with a little trepidation because he isn't an Ethan Hawke fan. Ever since Reality Bites he hasn't really cared for the actor, but this time out Hawke impressed him as a personable and sympathetic hero. Willem Dafoe is Willem Dafoe, but that's a good thing. Sam Neill is too obviously a villain from the onset and doesn't hide it with his performance, though he has one good scene when he actually seems to regret what he's put his daughter through. The rest of the actors, including Michael Dorman as Ed's brother and Claudia Karvan as the human heroine, are underdeveloped, the brother especially given how important his changing motives are to the story.

The Spierigs are at their best as satirists and manipulators of suspense. Wendigo singles out two scenes for praise: a riot at a coffee stand when consumers discover that the blood content has been cut and Ed's daytime drive into the shade of a large tree for a meeting with fugitive humans. The first exemplifies the satiric, dystopian element of the film, how the artificial normality of the vampire majority can fall apart over petty things and turn purported people into battling animals. The second, an early episode, is convincingly tense because the directors have put over their concept and made clear what a huge risk Ed is taking by traveling to the middle of nowhere in broad daylight, with only the shade to save him from burning death. Whenever the action follows from the concept, Daybreakers is on sure ground. When there's action for action's sake, the film is less sure. But for a concept man like Wendigo, the film is a unique enough take on vampires to earn a bloody thumb up.

AGE OF CONSENT (1969)

There's a new movie of The Tempest coming out this fall. The gimmick is that Prospero will be played by Helen Mirren. In this age of inclusive casting, I say: Why not? I expect that when the film comes out, someone will find it ironic that Mirren took the part, given that she made her film debut in a movie some believe was inspired by the same Shakespeare play. Of course, it seems sometimes as if all you need to do is make a movie with an old man on an island and someone will say it was inspired by The Tempest, especially if it comes late in a filmmaker's career. Age of Consent was Michael Powell's final feature film, and the director is arguably more of a Prospero figure than the painter played by co-producer James Mason. Powell found himself in Australia after the British film industry effectively blackballed him for making Peeping Tom in 1960. Exiled from the studio resources that had made his great collaborations with Emeric Pressburger possible, Powell had to find ways to make magic on the cheap. That he succeeded doesn't make Age another Tempest. At least it's less interesting to me as a variation on Shakespeare than as a variation on Powell's own past work.

Mason plays Bradley Monahan, an abstract artist who can't stand to see his works treated like commodities in a New York gallery. He flees to his Australian homeland, to a little island near the Great Barrier Reef, in search of solitude, excepting his dog Godfrey. He gains fresh inspiration after encountering Cora (Mirren), a feral teenager who catches crustaceans to sell to local grocers. Cora toils for her wicked grandmother, but is saving some money of her own to move to Brisbane on in the hope of becoming a hairdresser. Bradley is a new customer, the proceeds from whom Cora can keep completely from the drunken hag of a grandma, but when the painter deduces that Cora has stolen someone else's chicken to sell to him, he suggests a more honest way of making her living: posing for him. While he doesn't seem to have done figurative art before, Cora stirs new creativity in him, and his artistic appreciation of her budding body makes her aware of her awakening womanhood. Others have been aware of it already, but she knows how to beat down unwanted suitors. The question is whether Bradley himself is a suitor or not....

Maybe Age of Consent is Michael Powell's Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Age of Consent is taken from a painter's novel, and the main characters are more Pygmalion and Galataea than Prospero and Miranda. That relationship reminded me of a similar relationship in Powell's most famous film, The Red Shoes. In that story, initiated by Pressburger and adopted by Powell later, Boris Lermontov is a ballet impresario and Victoria Page his star dancer in the making. A visionary but not an artist in his own right, Lermontov shapes Page into his desired image through intellectual and emotional manipulation. Vicky is torn between her loyalty to dance and her love for a composer -- Lermontov has told her that she can't have both art and love -- and the tension destroys her. In Age, Powell directs a kind of do-over of the fundamental archetypal relationship at the heart of Shoes. While Lermontov may see himself as the real total artist and Vicky as his model, in Age that's the actual relationship between the leads. Cora becomes a willing servant of Bradley's art, eventually putting aside any agenda of her own. As a true artist, Bradley's mentorship of Cora is free of the manipulative, exploitative quality that makes Lermontov a kind of villain. And in an ending that actually took me by surprise, but struck me afterward as an old director's self-gratifying fantasy, Bradley's apparently selfless dedication to art is rewarded by Cora's sexual desire.

Powell's achievement in Age of Consent is kind of magical. Without the resources to create the incredible special effects of his Forties films, the director put his artistic stamp on the film with details as simple as set painting. Bradley gradually transforms his sabbatical shack into a dazzling interior, complete with dazzling sawblade sun, and once he's fully settled in you know that you're in Michael Powell's world. He also makes the most of a lush location; Bradley's paradise combines the best of nature and art.

Young Mirren is a kind of special effect in her own right, setting a precedent for decades of cinematic nudity with which her reputation as a great actress has only recently caught up. James Mason is a hero merely for facilitating a final Powell feature, but he was clearly a true believer in this project, giving a looser, livelier performance than I'd ever seen from him. With his beard and his hint of an Australian accent he seems determined not to do "James Mason," and he succeeds admirably. The only major fault I can find with this film is Jack MacGowran's obnoxious performance as Bradley's disreputable crony, who brings nearly needless plot complications with him to the island. On the other hand, Godfrey gives a great performance, almost award-worthy if there was a supporting animal category.

Powell's luck remained bad, however, and Age of Consent was shown in most markets in mutilated form. Fortunately, I never got around to seeing it until Sony made it available in a two-film set with A Matter of Life and Death, one of the director's Forties triumphs. Age is not embarrassed by the company.

In Brief: BRIGHT STAR (2009)

It was a negative review that I didn't get around to reading until after Jane Campion's film had left the local art house that finally interested me in seeing her tale of the romance of John Keats and Fanny Brawne. The review appeared in The New York Review of Books, and was written by Christopher Ricks, a critic and Keats scholar. The full review is only available for subscribers, but the excerpt available for free will give you idea enough of Ricks's beef with Campion. To sum up, Campion's offense, in Ricks's view, was to wander into the old debate between the critics and the biographers. It's kind of a one-sided war. The biographers do their thing, which is to inquire into the influence of life on art, and certain critics attack them. These critics accuse the biographers of going overboard, as if they meant to prove that every word written by an author could be traced to an episode from his life. That approach, to the extent that anyone employs it, supposedly denigrates the author's power of creation and, more importantly, imagination. Ricks feels that Bright Star compounds the biographic fallacy by illustrating Keats' inspirations in so literal-minded a fashion that the movie might undermine the poetry's potential to evoke sympathetic imagery in another reader's mind.

Ricks's diatribe got me interested in seeing Bright Star because it left me wondering whether Campion intended anything like what Ricks accused her of doing. I can't say I'm a Campion fan; her only films that I'd seen before this were The Piano and Holy Smoke! That selection should tell you that I approached those films as a Harvey Keitel fan first. I did like both of them, though, and I don't mind the occasional 19th century period piece or biopic, so once a copy of the new film turned up on the New Arrivals shelf at the library, and especially after some bloggers have touted it as among the best films of last year and the decade, I grabbed it.

I was quickly satisfied that Campion had attempted neither literary criticism nor biography. Bright Star is not about Keats's career; it opens with him having already published, albeit without popular success. Nor does it attempt to explain the composition of specific poems in the manner of the old Hollywood biopics. The film is a romance set in the Romantic era, in a milieu pervaded with art. Keats writes his poems, brainstorms plays with his crony Charles Brown, and sings (or vocalizes) in an informal male chorus. Fanny Brawne is an artist (or craftsman) in her own right, a creator rather than follower of fashion, and someone who can be moved by poetry while struggling to understand how it works. For a while I thought the lovers would serve as symbols of craft and genius as separate aspects of art, but Campion isn't up to anything that pretentious. But there is a payoff to the interplay of art and emotion. Keats is moved to poetry by his romance as his earlier poetry had moved Brawne toward romance, but the romance shapes her craft as well. During one of the poet's absences, she gives up her sewing and tells her little sister that she doesn't care a damn for stitches. But at the end, her love for Keats inspires a work of art from her: a new mourning dress she wears for a walk through the wintry woods and a recitation of the title poem.

You don't need to know anything about John Keats beforehand or want to read his poems later to appreciate Bright Star. It's quite self-sufficient as a persuasive evocation of the Romantic age. The actors talk and move like people from another time; Campion's ear and eye for the soulful formality of old-time manners are impressive. Films like this remind us that manners can just as easily encompass emotions as suppress them, especially when enacted by actors of the caliber of Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw as our romantic leads. Paul Schneider as Charles Brown overdoes it a bid in a more comical role that overstates a rivalry between him and Brawne for Keats's attention if not affection, and the film did seem to run out of things to say or do before the inevitable end and a moving finale. But the overall experience is a positive one, enhanced by Greig Fraser's cinematography and an original score by Mark Bradshaw that reaches beyond the period for dramatic effect rather than aping the stereotype sounds of 1820.

Bright Star is also one of those films where you'll want to stay through the closing credits. That's because you'll hear Whishaw reading some nice lines from Keats as the credits roll. These lyrics aren't illustrated in any way that could offend Christopher Ricks or any other critic, nor does the film as a whole brainwash you into any interpretation of Keats's work. Ricks's concern over how the movie would influence future readers of Keats made him overlook the obvious. Bright Star isn't a work of criticism or interpretation; it's a work of art in its own right.

Discovering UNCIVILISED

The Internet Archive describes this film by pioneer Australian director Charles Chauvel as his attempt to break into the international market. Such an aspiration may explain the weird generic mix Uncivilised presents to the unprepared viewer. In 78 minutes it contains scenes of violent action and almost horrific suspense, lurid romance, fantasies of primtivism, drug addiction and race mixing, and songs. It's as if MGM replaced Johnny Weissmuller in the role of Tarzan with Nelson Eddy or Walter Woolf King, or if Chauvel envisioned his star, Dennis Hoey, as a white Paul Robeson. I don't want to go overboard and call Uncivilised a musical, but it's a very musical film. That's just part of the whole delirious package.

The setting is the northwest part of Australia, "still embalmed in mystery" in 1936. There are rumors that a "wild white man," the orphaned son of missionaries, rules an aboriginal tribe in the region. The authorities wonder whether this mystery man might be involved in the pituri trade. Pituri is "a narcotic desert plant that induces a voluptuous condition," as author Beatrice Lynn is horrified to learn. Her publisher, Mr. Hemmingway, is pushing her to visit the region and write a book about the WWM. She needs fresh subject matter after her last few duds, he insists. "Get a new angle on life," he tells her, "Find this wild white man. Hypnotize him. Make him fall in love with you. Bring back his scalp."

Beatrice is to be escorted into the wild country by Radcliffe, a mounted policeman. Care must be taken because Moopil the Black Killer, mad son of Vitchi the Witch Doctor, is on the prowl. You know he's near when you hear a huge scream; whether its his or a victim's, I couldn't tell you. But Moopil proves to be the least of Bea's problems. The first night out, she's snatched out of her tent by a man in a turban. This film is seventy years ahead of its time in picking an Afghan as its initial villain. This is Akbar Jan, who sells pituri to the aborigines but would like to get in on the more lucrative opium trade. The wild white man doesn't care much for Akbar, but a white woman (that is, a white loobra) may be the Afghan's ticket into a new market. If Bea doesn't like the plan, she could try her luck with Moopil. "If he caught you, you would not live," Akbar advises, "and maybe you would not die, for week." We've seen Moopil do his stuff on a couple of white guys who protest impotently, "Come out, you black devils! Come out, you black hounds of hell!" before getting speared -- just so you keep the threat in mind.

Soon Akbar's gang of snake-eating tribesmen rendezvous with the coneheaded minions of the wild white man. "Well, Miss book writer," Akbar says, "You fat in fire now." We look down on the party as it approaches, from the lofty vantage of Mara, the wild white man himself. Classic movie fans could only reel at the thought I planted in my last post, that this is none other than Dennis Hoey, who played Inspector Lestrade in several of Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes pictures for Universal in the 1940s. Here he is barefoot, bare chested, and in full voice as he gives some love call along the lines of "Oh, eye-oh, EYE-OHH!" When Akbar and Bea arrive in his village of bare-breasted women, he ceremoniously lays hands on the white woman. "I put hand on shoulder, tribe know you're mine," he explains.

An awkward courtship begins. Mara is very much a savage, noble or not. He has a Tarzan-like power word to command people, "kilowati" (in my approximation) translating roughly to "ungaawa." His table matters are atrocious, provoking the otherwise terrified Bea to laugh her head off. Akbar needs to explain things to the white chief. "White mens and white womans have many different customs," he relates, "It is for the white woman to speak. She must say no or yes....Do not forget, Mara, you are white."

"Sometimes I do forget," Mara confesses. But something holds him back when he might otherwise manhandle the defiant Beatrice. He throws her to the floor when she slaps him, but he softens quickly and promises that no one will hurt her. Grabbing on to this glimmer of hope, Bea writes in her journal, "He is not all savage. Can I rely upon his white instincts for protection?"

The plot thickens with the arrival of Trask, a white opium dealer. He's been an occasional visitor in Mara's village, without revealing his real objective. Mara's parents were rather rich for missionaries. Among their unaccounted-for possessions, beside Mara himself (nee Marvin), are the Van Druyten rubies, "worth more than all the opium in China" in Trask's estimate. Akbar has been trying to find the rubies in order to trade them with Trask for opium. Trask is trying to avoid the middleman by getting the rubies from Sondra, the resident half-caste. Now follow the trail of drama: Beatrice Lynn resists the advances of Mara, for whom Sondra pines jealously, she herself being the love object of both Akbar and Vitchi the witch doctor (who has threatened to choke her if Mara won't let him have her), the latter of whom is inciting his son Moopil the Black Killer to attack the village to avenge himself on Mara for various slights. Do you have all that? Very good. Now you can watch Bea take a skinny dip.

Did I mention that Sondra is jealous? Don't take my word for it. "I hate the white woman," she says, "You hear me, I want her to die, to die, but first to go like fire inside, go mad!" This she confides in a witch who hands her some pituri to spike Bea's food with. Recall that pituri induces a "voluptuous" state in users. Up to this point the courtship has been developing gradually, though it is complicated by Mara's ignorance of the word "love." But when Bea suddenly comes on too strong he catches the stink of pituri on her and doesn't like it. He is disillusioned. "I no think of you as woman," he tells her, "I think of you as black men do their totem, their gods. But I fool. You just like other loobras. You eat thing I hate....Pituri woman!" The poor man probably doesn't realize that he's done the right thing. But Bea sets him straight later, after he sobers up: "If you had listened to that pituri," she says, "I would have killed myself."

But things are approaching the breaking point. Moopil the Black Killer is closing in, and the Van Druyten rubies have been found. Mara has been keeping the tribe in line with his charismatic singing in native lingo, like a dancing Mussolini. But the mood grows inexorably darker and the natives get spookier looking, almost fluorescent in their body paint in the black and white cinematography, which looks good even in the Internet Archive copy. There's going to be a showdown or two, or three, as grudges are resolved, secret agendas are revealed, and Beatrice faces a Jane's Choice between the acclaim of civilization and her growing love for the WWM. Of course her struggle is moot if Mara can't survive the big battle between his tribe and Moopil's band -- actually quite the fierce affair with plenty of spear effects, including a fleeting spear-to-the-eye shot.

Again, this is a film I had not heard of until last night. I chose to look at it almost at random while trawling through the Archive's movie holdings. It was a revelation if not an outright apocalypse. Its feverish presentation of aborigines comes as a jolt to someone used to the quite benign portrayal of them in current product. The film's racism gives it a transgressive kick that might be intolerable to some people, but it's not as if we're talking about The Eternal Jew or The Birth of A Nation here. In any event, the movie is so strange in so many ways that the racist bits recede in memory compared to the crowning oddity of Dennis Hoey's extraordinary performance. I can't speak for Uncivilised's box-office success, if it had any abroad, but I have to give Charles Chauvel credit for putting Australia on the map of the wild world of cinema.

Note: the illustrations are thumbnails taken from the Internet Archive. I would have made screen captures myself, but when you pause the Archive player you get a start-button graphic that mars the image. In any event, you can watch the film itself by referring to my previous post, or by visiting the Internet Archive.

UNCIVILISED (1936)

Surfing through the movie collection over at the admirable Internet Archive, I stumbled tonight upon a landmark in the wild world of cinema, an utterly mad movie in classic pulp style out of Australia. It's the earliest Australian movie I've ever seen, and it makes quite the exotic impression, though probably an embarrassing one as well for sensitive souls.

Here's how the archive itself describes the film: "A white novelist, looking for a story in the outback, is kidnapped by an Afghan slaver, betrothed to a white jungle-man, and menaced by a jealous half-caste rival, a hostile witch-doctor, his crazed-killer son, and opium smugglers!" The exclamation point is theirs, and it's well-earned. But they forgot to mention the tribal warfare and brutal violence, the snake eating, the jewel thieves, the bare-breasted natives, the skinny-dipping white woman (two years after Tarzan and His Mate, and after the Code crackdown in America), the stupendous racism (though that was probably implied) and Australia's answer to the singing cowboy: Dennis Hoey, the Inspector Lestrade of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies, as a singing white aborigine chieftain. Trust me on this: this number has just about everything a movie cultist might want -- though some might miss the color.

Take a look at the complete 78 minute wonder yourself, either here or at the Archive. I'll have more to say about this barbaric little treasure in a subsequent post.

DAY OF THE PANTHER (1987)

There are trailers in circulation on YouTube and elsewhere that gave me the impression that the Australian director Brian Trenchard-Smith was someone to watch for tough action cinema from the '70s and '80s. A quick check of his filmography reveals his best-regarded work probably to be the Vietnam War film The Siege of Firebase Gloria from 1989. Before taking on that task, however, he made a pair of martial arts films set in Perth, Day of the Panther being the first. It would not make you optimistic about his later work.

The Panther films were meant to make a star out of one Edward John Stazak. He's introduced to us as Jason Blade, undergoing an initiation ritual at the Temple of the Panthers alongside Linda Anderson, observed by her father and Jason's mentor, William Anderson. Jason and Linda aren't just martial artists, they're also undercover agents for the British government of Hong Kong. Jason closes out his initiation by branding himself, an obligation Linda is apparently spared. This done, we see them sneak into a restaurant to observe a drug deal between some local gangsters and an Australian. He's Baxter, the right hand man of Damien Zukor, the crime boss of Perth. The deal goes bad and Baxter shoots his way out. Detected, Jason and Linda fight their way out, but just miss Baxter.

Linda tracks Baxter back to Perth. She finds herself stalked by three guys in masks: a skull-face, an old-man, and a pig -- or more likely some sort of cartoon pig that Australians might recognize. In an extended sequence, stuttering cross-cut with Jason gradually making his way to Perth, where the local cops mistake him for "one of the top triad enforcers," the masked dudes pursue Linda through an abandoned factory, and she gradually wears them down. It looks like she kills at least two of them, one getting impaled and the other thrown off a roof after a very convincingly clumsy rooftop chase. But it turns out that they've only softened her up for Baxter, who beats her down pretty easily, then finishes her with a switchblade.

The problem with Day of the Panther is that I've just described the action highlight of the movie, and it has about an hour to go. As Linda, Linda Megier is no great shakes as an actress, which may be why most of her subsequent credits are for stunt work, but she's nice to watch fighting for her life, and she at least brings a conviction to her big action scene that Edward John Stazak completely lacks. He's one of the most laid-back avengers you'll ever see in a genre film, and wears a dopey smirk on his face most of the time. The Panther films appear to be his only movie work, and that doesn't surprise me.

It isn't clear whether Jason Blade and Linda were romantically linked, but I suspect not. Jason's mode of mourning seems to involve training on the beach. Meanwhile, Linda's dad is hardly more bereaved. He runs a gym in Perth, and he's very quick to foist his niece Gemma (Paris Jefferson) on Jason. She's quick to foist herself, later seducing Jason in a ghastly '80s workout costume as "Take Me Back" plays on the boombox. But I get ahead of myself. We must backtrack as Jason plots his revenge by infiltrating Damien Zukor's organization. He shows up at Zukor's marina to apply for work by beating up a bunch of his bodyguards.

Soon afterwards the cops bring Jason in to warn him against blowing their delicate investigation of Zukor. Two lame comedy-relief cops, Flinders and Lambert, are assigned to tail him. Meanwhile, Jason's strategy has paid off. Zukor was so impressed by his demonstration that he's invited him to a party, where they match wits with such brilliant repartee as:

Zukor: You like parties?
Jason: Is that what this is?
Zukor: You're sharp, Blade.

Zukor gives Jason a tryout. Sent to deliver a drug parcel, our hero is ambushed but prevails with minimal fuss. News of this latest brawl further alarms the cops, with Flinders announcing, "We can't have him running around Perth conducting his own version of the gunfight at the OK Corral!" As it happens, Jason was set up with fake drugs; Zukor wanted to see if he'd run off with the goods. Zukor trusts him more now, but Baxter doesn't. Baxter struts about in a Miami Vice style getup and seethes with jealousy of Zukor. "He has weaknesses like most men," Baxter says of his boss, in a manner that made me wonder about Baxter.

Who can blame Baxter when Zukor has the bright idea of hyping Jason as Baxter's challenger in his annual martial-arts tournament, held in an amphitheater, by spreading the story that Jason had already beaten Baxter in a fight? Jason himself has supposedly suggested doing this so Zukor can clean up when he helpfully throws the fight, but Baxter likes the situation less and less. He sends some guys to do a Nancy Kerrigan to Jason in a parking garage, but Blade prevails in the usual rout. In the meantime, Baxter sneaks into the Anderson gym, grabs Gemma and interrogates her about Jason, and is challenged by William. Baxter gets one good shot in, but when William declares himself unimpressed, Baxter bails, announcing, "I don't have time for this shit!"

He's back again later and strikes paydirt: a picture of Jason and Linda Anderson, proving that Jason must be a special agent himself. He gets more men to attack Jason at a basketball court, and this time Jason runs for it. William and Gemma ride to the rescue and they all head to the amphitheater, where they suspect Zukor keeps his drugs. This time Zukor captures them all and stages a decisive fight between Jason and Baxter for his own amusement....

The early factory fight is not only the highlight of the film but the most violent scene. The rest, the climax especially, is quite anticlimactic, especially given that this is supposed to be a revenge film. But Jason and William seem all too mellow when it counts, if only to set up the sequel, Strike of the Panther (also known as Fists of Blood), announced at the end of the film. But the limp ending is consistent with the lack of enthusiasm and energy throughout the project. Trenchard-Smith must have realized that Stazak wasn't much to work with. That would explain the perfunctory, almost demoralized quality of the production. Since I was watching a fullscreen copy from the Mill Creek Entertainment Drive-In Classics box set, I concede that the film wasn't shown in optimum format, but it didn't look like I was missing much on the sides of the frame. On this evidence, Australian kung fu is no good, but I'm willing to be proven wrong on that point.