By Kate Lahey
“I honestly cannot approve of Mad Max,” declared Martha DuBose, film critic for The Sydney Morning Herald in 1979. “Its flagrant pandering and calculated titillation are basically repugnant.”
That’s how the Herald reviewed the film that has become one of the most successful Australian movies ever made and spawned a five-decade-spanning franchise. The latest instalment, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, hits screens this week.
Mel Gibson and Steve Bisley starred in the original Mad Max film in 1979.Credit: Artwork by Matt Davidson
The Age was more generous to the Victorian-based production, describing it as “brutally brilliant”.
George Miller’s dystopian action film exploded into cinemas in Australia in April 1979 and went on to become the most profitable film in the world for two decades (until The Blair Witch Project in 1999).
In 1977, visiting Sydney to talk to prospective cast and crew, director and co-writer Miller described it to the Herald as “a satire on the speed mentality on the road, kids on fast bikes, fast cars, scavenger tow trucks, ambulances”. Little did we know what was about to hit us.
The $350,000 film (small even by 1979 standards) starred a rookie actor who was just one week out of NIDA: 21-year-old Mel Gibson.
Gibson and Bisley were fresh out of acting school when they started on the original Mad Max.
“NIDA’s class of ’77 looks like being a bumper crop,” the Herald reported, noting Gibson’s classmate, Steve Bisley, who was cast as Jim Goose.
Critics from The Age and Herald differed in their opinions. DuBose wrote that the filmmakers should expect to cop a lot of flak “because their film is not only extremely violent, but patently lacking in redeeming social value”.
“With Mad Max, what you see is what you get – the best-crafted piece of exploitation cinema to come out of the so-called Australian revival. It is so consistently superficial that one cannot excuse its appeal by ascribing it to higher motives or themes.”
DuBose enjoyed the opening chase and crash “among the best-orchestrated seat-grippers I’ve seen”. She also noted the film’s American western overtones, and how it diverged from the genre “in its annihilation of moral distinctions between good and bad guys”.
“If the film has any message,” she wrote, “it is the relativity of beastliness, and in this lies the Australian character of the film.”
DuBose felt the virtue of Mad Max was its method, “the careful attention to detail and effect” in a neat distilling of the strongest elements of cheap-thrills genres.
She wrote: “Qualms aside, it is obvious that in George Miller we have a filmmaker of exceptional ability. Whether or not he chooses to move on to more ‘serious’ themes, he is a master craftsman.”
The Age’s critic, Colin Bennet, was impressed, though not enough to make it his lead review. That honour went to crime comedy The Brink’s Job, a fictional retelling of a 1950 robbery in Boston starring Peter Falk.
“Technically speaking, the Australian Mad Max is as brutally brilliant as any car smash action film I have seen,” Bennett wrote.
“It could have been a whole lot more. Mad Max is saturated by director George Miller with a surreal quality. It has a bizarre, striking visual style that combines the Hell’s Angels elements of Stone with the doomsday mystique of The Cars That Ate Paris. But the points Miller and writer James McCausland might have been making about the rituals and rites of their caricatured heavies and bikies and droogs look like they have been lost along the highway.
“We are left with some really striking composition and a subjective impression of breakneck speed and noise compounded by the pounding and screaming of Brian May’s fulsome score, all this in a film of amoral tone and exciting/sickening impact.
“And so we get ... the usual jolly round of pack rape, severed limbs and incineration, climaxed naturally by gloating retribution, as the young cop hero, disillusioned with his job, dons his leathers once more to take hideous revenge on the gang that has maimed his wife and killed his child.
“George Miller… obviously has some kind of obsession with mutilation, perhaps from days spent in a casualty ward as a medical man.
“This time Miller has simply settled for the American red-neck market, where his film may well make a lot of money. But he has so much talent, one would like to see it put to use on less blatantly exploitative material, now that Mad Max is out of his system.”
By April 21, unable to contain their glee, Roadshow Distributors took out an ad in The Age, headlined: “Something incredible has happened in two continents.”
It quoted rave reviews, record crowds of 10,000 “sitting in stunned disbelief” at a Melbourne cinema; American industry figures predicting it would take its place as powerhouse film, with Psycho, the Exorcist and Midnight Express; and this: “In a sneak preview to test reaction at a Melbourne drive-in, MAD MAX was given the first-ever standing ovation drive-in style. Cars stayed at the end tooting their horns in approval. Sales of hamburgers were at an all-time-record low!”
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