This was published 3 months ago
A lover, a one-time hater and a newcomer debate the original Mad Max
By Nell Geraets, Garry Maddox and Sandra Hall
When doctor-turned-filmmaker George Miller was editing Mad Max in the late 1970s, he doubted he even had a film worth releasing. Now, 45 years on, it has been followed by four more films in an iconic action series that has become one of Australia’s greatest cultural exports.
The first Mad Max film follows Mel Gibson’s Max Rockatansky, a cop who takes revenge on a motorcycle gang terrorising an apocalyptic society in the near future. It polarised audiences when it was released in 1979, with The New York Times describing it as “ugly and incoherent”, and social commentator Phillip Adams comparing it to Mein Kampf.
But it went on to become one of the most profitable films in history, and inspired four other blockbuster films, including Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. With Furiosa opening in cinemas, three writers from this masthead, all with different histories of watching Mad Max, share their take on it.
The original Mad Max film polarised audiences in 1979, but it grew to become one of Australia’s greatest cultural exports.
The Lover
Garry Maddox
I didn’t see Mad Max until after Mad Max 2 (1981) had become one of my favourite Australian films.
When I first watched the original, it suffered by comparison. It looked like director George Miller and producer Byron Kennedy didn’t have enough money to make it, the acting was patchy, and Mel Gibson had a thin voice and an American accent that seemed strangely out of place in a futuristic rural Australia.
The second time around, I realised that even if Miller and Kennedy really didn’t have enough money to make it, they created something that deserved all its international success. It’s violent, true. It has a troubling sexual undercurrent, definitely. But it’s a raw blast of cinematic energy that is both very Australian and universal.
Following such earlier (and inferior) Australian action films as Stone and The Man From Hong Kong, Mad Max has a similar larrikin spirit but is more original and the stunts are wilder. It also has a memorable ensemble of supporting characters, led by loose cannon motorcycle cop Jim Goose, Max’s spirited wife Jessie, psychotic cop killer Nightrider and menacing motorcycle gang leader Toecutter.
But the heart of the film is Max, a Western hero – in black leather – who cleans up a lawless land.
Watching it again this week, I can see there is so much that’s iconic about the film: a cop car crashing through a caravan, two racing cars speeding either side of a toddler, gang member Cundalini losing his hand, Jessie and son Sprog being mowed down by Toecutter’s gang, the famous black Interceptor and Max shackling Johnny the Boy to a car wreck and telling him he can either saw through the handcuffs or his ankle.
There are connections that carry through the decades into the latest instalments, including the first of the Pole Cat stunts that were so effective in Mad Max: Fury Road and Nico Lathouris, who played the Grease Rat, joining Miller as a writer on both Fury Road and Furiosa.
Fifi (Roger Ward) was right when he said: “You’ll be back Rockatansky.”
The Newcomer
Nell Geraets
I went into this expecting something similar to the only Mad Max film I really knew: Fury Road. So, you can imagine my surprise when I turned on the 1979 version and saw no post-apocalyptic wasteland, no maniacal War Boys, and no insanely pimped-out cars (though a simpler version of Max’s Interceptor does make an appearance). The aesthetic of the original felt entirely different to Fury Road, almost like it’s a separate universe altogether.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Regardless of its simple setting (most of it takes place on a plain stretch of road), Mad Max’s opening scene had me hooked. The car chase between the cops and Nightrider was so hectic and real, probably because (as I later found out) they were actually driving at breakneck speeds when filming. It was immediately clear that, in this world, high stakes are the norm.
The film was, at times, painfully raw. Raw because of the lack of advanced CGI, but also because of its psychotic characters. The gang members, particularly Cundalini, Nightrider and Mudguts, were so erratic, that it was difficult to watch at times. Their cackling made me feel as if I had entered some kind of delirium.
Even more challenging were its frankly disturbing themes. Much of the conflict was centred on the biker gang’s targeting of Max’s wife and child, a pair they eventually chased down and killed after Max’s wife rejected Toecutter’s advances (let’s call it what it was: sexual harassment). As if needless violence weren’t enough, there were also multiple allusions to rape and sexual molestation throughout, making it pretty difficult viewing in a post-MeToo reality.
Speaking of difficult viewing, watching Mel Gibson with the knowledge of his later antisemitic and racist rants was rather uncomfortable. It’s challenging to look past these elements when you’re coming in with so much external hindsight, and don’t already consider it a nostalgic favourite.
Mad Max was largely defined by its impressive precision stunts and large-scale crashes.
That being said, it was an eye-opening origin story. Max wasn’t always a grunting, hardened vigilante – he was once a loving husband and father, ready to retire from the force. His descent into insanity finally makes sense, driven by an understandable lust for revenge and exacerbated by an unforgiving landscape overrun by greed, anarchy and corruption. The line between sane and insane – between creation and destruction – has never looked so thin. I shudder thinking of how thin that line remains in our own reality today.
One-time hater
Sandra Hall
At the time, Mad Max was not what some of us were looking for. We thought Australia’s contemporary urban life was under-represented on the screen and were waiting for more of it.
As a result, my review of Mad Max was pretty scathing. I called it “a wonderfully accomplished exploitation film … technically brilliant, but lacking both anybody to care about and anything to think about”. I now think that was too harsh and that I was being excessively moralistic about it. I even went so far as to call it “A Clockwork Orange without the moral arguments”. How po-faced can you get!
I did recognise it as the most dynamic Australian film I had seen, and it left me in no doubt as to Mel Gibson’s star power. I also marvelled at the sinister suavity of Hugh Keays-Byrne’s villain, Toecutter. I had seen Keays-Byrne in Stone, the bikie film made by Sandy Harbutt five years earlier and realised that Toecutter was a variation on Toad, the character he played in that film – with the addition of some even more bizarre flourishes. It was as if he were embodying a very black joke.
But I did fail to appreciate the originality of the concept. All I registered were the similarities with Hollywood action movies. I didn’t give enough credit to the way George Miller used the widescreen to put drama into those endless highways and limitless landscapes. And there’s the courage and craftsmanship of David Eggby’s handheld camera work, some of which was done from the back of a motorbike.
Miller’s impeccable sense of timing invokes inevitable comparisons with Duel, the road movie which gave Steven Spielberg his breakthrough, but Mad Max is more elaborately choreographed. I now see it as a film which crystallises the ingenuity and can-do spirit which has always infused Australian cinema.
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