Table Talk: Bob Ellis on Film and Theatre

Stone, with a few caveats, is a big unexpected success. Pre-dating by five years its bedfellow Mad Max, it gives us not just a preview of what the Australian film industry – raw, action-packed, nork-flashing and unafraid – might have become, but a time capsule of the talent then spilling out of it. Bill Hunter, the barman, seems a pale nonentity; Terry Bader, the garage mechanic, a superstar; Hugh Keayes-Byrne, the operatic bully, the next Oliver Reed; Drew Forsythe, quite remarkable as a shy teenager warily refusing Hugh’s tongue-kiss, a potential Michael York; Rebecca Giblin the next Susannah York; Helen Morse the next Jean Simmons; the lead Ken Shorter, somewhere between the next Malcolm McDowell and the next Tommy Steele. Other faces out of Mad Max – Vince Gill, Roger Ward – crowd the frames, and one finds oneself wondering what went wrong and why they were not all eventual superstars like Mel. The costumed prissification that followed Picnic at Hanging Rock, probably, and the tax-dodge banalities of 10BA. And it’s a pity.

Stone is the surname of the undercover cop (Shorter) whom the Gravediggers permit to ride along with them while he searches for their serial assassin, who beheads one of them with a wire across the road (I was pleased to the furry face in the rolling helmet was the producer, David Hannay) or snipes at them accurately from high angles. Stone is a long-haired, pure-hearted fellow. He refuses cannabis, alcohol and all offered sex from the frequently naked molls around him, succumbing to just one kiss and is beaten near to death for it by Undertaker, her bloke (Sandy Harbutt); but, like an anthropologist among Nuigini savages, comes to like the Gravediggers and their Homeric, heroic, violent, wandering lifestyle – much of the movie being a study of how they steep themselves in the codes they live by: the fealty, the fidelity (a girl can say to a bloke it’s over, but must never cheat on him) and the roaring Arthurian-quest they vroom down streets in, skidding round corners and getting up on one wheel, similar to that of Easy Rider and Romper Stomper.

The urban vistas, often twilight, by Graham Lind, the cinematographer, are amazingly beautiful. The editing by Ian Barry is terrific. The costume design by Helen Morse and Margaret Ure and the bike stunts by Peter Armstrong and others are very good indeed. Most of the acting is very fine, with outstanding walk-ons by Garry McDonald and Susan Lloyd.

But…the dialogue is no good (Sandy Harbutt and Michael Robinson), and, though not fatal, it hurts. Great actors have agonies with long expository lines that a half day with John Dingwall or David Williamson would have sorted, and it hurts.

Nonetheless, it is a success, the storyline true-hearted and well-structured, the research honest and unstinted. The Gravediggers are minor terrorists but also a tribe and they have a right, we feel – like the Tauregs, like the Apaches and the Aruntas – to be on earth, roaring down its highways and punching each other out in pubs.

Sandy Harbutt’s direction is wonderful, and his management of the violent scenes as good as, say, Scorsese. And it would have seemed a toss-up then as to whether he or George Miller would have become a world figure. Sandy lived off the film for about two decades (it was always in a drive-in somewhere in South America, selling out) and he got, perhaps, a bit lazy. He had for years in development an Alex Buzo adaptation of The Drums of Mer (to be produced and directed by and to star himself) and he lost Helen Morse, and may have lost heart. And it’s a pity.

Ken Shorter, for a long time a local star, did well in England in the RSC and Morse, affrighted by Far East, left film for good and played Coward and Tennessee Williams a lot in Perth, Newcastle and similar places, on stage. Bill Hunter leapt out of apparent mediocrity in this film to Newsfront four years later and the perpetual national affection he persisted in for forty years. But…

I’m not saying the film had a curse on it. But it was a false dawn in some ways. It proved an Australian genre – the bikie western, or the highway western – that could, in Sandy’s hands, have become a world-conqueror in a modest way that George Miller refused to stay in, getting more and more like science fiction.

It had honesty, and honour, and modesty. And it looks thrillingly good now. Frame by frame, fight by fight, gunfight and bike crash and ride after ride into urban sunsets, it is a great inspirer of young movie makers then and now. And well worth rediscovering, about twice a year.