Wasteland Ronin: Part 1
Restricted media is everywhere in the 21st century and parents worry that their children will see something raunchy or violent on a computer but it was difficult for we pre-internet kids to see such material. In 1979 I was 15 years old, unable to get into an 18+ movie and envied schoolmates with older siblings who’d sneak them into the drive-in the boot of their car, to guzzle beer and watch the 1970s greats of Ozploitation; Fantasm, Stone, Patri, The Man from Hong Kong or the greatest drive-in movie of them all…
MAD MAX!
I finally saw it in 1982 when I turned 18. Crudely made but with flashes of sheer brilliance, it was essentially George Miller’s film school. His only formal film training was a brief film workshop (attended while in medical school in the early 1970s) where he met his creative collaborator and business partner, Byron Kennedy. Their first short film, Violence in Cinema: Part 1, was made in 1971 and their next step was to make a feature film. Although the Australian government was funding films, Kennedy & Miller knew that Mad Max would be a tough sell, so they sought private investors instead. Miller raised extra funds working as a mobile emergency doctor, with Kennedy as his driver, and the vehicular trauma they witnessed undoubtedly found its way into their film. Like another former medical student turned storyteller, J.G. Ballard (author of the novel, Crash) Miller explores the fetishistic relationship between humans and their cars in Mad Max. Miller’s medical background (and sense of humour) are evident in ‘Mad’ Max Rockatansky being named for 19th century pathologist Carl von Rokitansky, (inventor of the procedure for removing internal organs in an autopsy).
The setting is ’a few years from now’ when society is in decline. MAX ROCKATANSKY is a lawman working for the MFP (the “Main Force Patrol”) operating out of a rundown “Hall Of Justice” (complete with its own BOM BOM BOM musical sting). Though representing the forces of law & order, MFP officers look like either young leatherboys or archetypal degenerates circa 1955, clad in Lenny & Squiggy’s black leathers. Their boss is chief FIFI MACAFEE, though named like a burlesque dancer he looks like a circus strongman or a bouncer at a gay bar. Burly, bald, moustachioed, and constantly bare-chested in his black leather pants, Fifi tries to keep Max focussed on the MFP mission of controlling wild motorcycle gangs, while Max worries that he’s becoming brutishly like the goons he’s supposed to stop.
Growing up in rural 1940s/1950s Australia and not going to film school meant that Miller wasn’t exposed to many filmmaking traditions (he’d never heard of Kurosawa until after making Mad Max, for example) but he cites classic silent films and watching drive-in movies without sound as influences on his own cinematic grammar. Mad Max was punk filmmaking, not just its gritty subject matter but its inventiveness. Full of raw energy, you can see the filmmakers learning their chords as they play. Need a stunt? Just head out somewhere remote and do it. When the director is a qualified ER doctor you deal with safety problems as they arise, and arise they did. Joanne Samuel got the role of Max’s wife, JESSIE, when the original actress broke her leg in a motorcycle accident (on her way TO the shoot, ironically) a crash that also injured and briefly sidelined Grant Page, the stunt coordinator. Miller’s bold vision was matched by the crew’s daring, and it wasn’t only the stuntmen who outdid themselves. Cinematographer David Eggby strapped himself to the back of a speeding motorbike to get a visceral hand-held POV shot of the 120kph rushing road and speedometer. These days, computers can deliver a shot from any angle the director imagines, but in 1977 it required a crew both inventive and bold enough to deliver.
A motorcycle gang wants to avenge one of their members, who died in a game of road ’chicken’ with Max. These Droogs on wheels are given to buffoonish-though-sinister antics, and led by the charismatic TOECUTTER (played with bug-eyed psychotic gusto by Hugh Keys-Byrne). Toecutter doesn’t actually have a villainous moustache to twirl, but to compensate, his lone eyebrow appears to twirl itself instead. To escape the stresses of dealing with this band of twerps-cum-perps, Max takes a holiday with his wife and infant son, but the vengeful gang, still mincing about like a wannabe Shakespeare troupe on peyote, finds Max’s family, as we knew they would.
Needing to cast and equip a bikie gang, legend has it that Kennedy and Miller simply got a real gang (The Vigilantes) and paid them in slabs of beer. I miss that 1970s-1980s era of cheap DIY cinematic invention, where the creativity of the director and resourcefulness of the producer were the best special effects in the budget. Miller has said that initially, setting the film “a few years from now” allowed for broader action that might be implausible in the real world, and setting the story in a decaying future society explained the shabby buildings and remote locations of the shoot, but later this became central to the Mad Max series.
Partly inspired by actual riots during the 1970s Energy Crisis, Miller & Kennedy (and journalist turned screenwriter James McCausland) explored the idea of a society disrupted by global energy decline taken as far as it would go. Miller’s youth growing up in the 1940s/1950s car culture and wide open spaces of rural Queensland, and that several of his friends died in car accidents while young, were parts used in the assembly of Mad Max’s distinctive chassis. The influence of A Clockwork Orange, Bullit and vigilante justice films of the 1970s, like Dirty Harry and Death Wish, became the narrative engine, and Miller’s flair for visual story-telling became the nitrous-oxide fuel for one of Australia’s first anamorphic wide-screen films, and Miller excelled at composing for this format, especially when the camera was moving.
The turning point comes when Max’s family is killed, and he becomes just as twisted as the road rabble he clashes with, exactly as he’d feared. While Dirty Harry merely flirted with the idea of a lawman crossing that line, Mad Max goes all the way. In a climactic sequence that shows Miller’s genius for kinetic cinema, Max becomes a killer himself, hunting down the baddies one by one in his Black-on-Black super-charged V8 INTERCEPTOR.
Many critics deplored the vigilantism. Critic Phillip Adams made exploitation cinema himself (producing The Adventures of Barry McKenzie) but preferred raunch over violence, and his review in The Bulletin entitled ‘The Dangerous Pornography of Death’ called for Mad Max to be banned, saying that it had ‘all the emotional uplift of Mein Kampf’. Mad Max actually was banned in Sweden and New Zealand for fears of copycat violence by real life motorcycle gangs. For the American release, Australian voices were overdubbed (not restored till the 2002 DVD) and Tom Buckley of The New York Times called the film ‘ugly and incoherent’ but TIME’s Richard Corliss praised it in his review entitled ‘Poetic Car-nage’. While the Critics debated its merits, Mad Max became a drive-in hit around the world. 1970s Australian cinema was a two-step of art house (The Last Wave) and grind house (Alvin Purple) culminating in Mad Max as its biggest success at decade’s end. On a shoestring production budget of AU $350,000 it made US $100 million at the box office which until The Blair Witch Project was the best budget to box office ratio in cinema history.
Some find Mad Max too crudely made to enjoy (especially viewers who saw The Road Warrior first) but, apart from getting to see a brilliant director’s raw and inventive feature film debut, I appreciate seeing the last sad gasp of society before the gangs took over completely, and witnessing the last remnants of Max’s own normalcy before he became a ‘man with no name’ type. This chapter of the Mad Max story can certainly be skipped, but there’s resonance in seeing the beginnings, before Max lost everything and he, and the world around him, went MAD.
In any vigilante justice flick the escalation of violence inevitably gets personal- after all, we bought a movie ticket to see MAX get MAD- but the price of vengeance is that Max himself becomes a hollow man. His decency and role in society gone, the only place left for him is with the wild marauders. A wandering lost soul, he heads off in his iconic black-on-black Interceptor.
