Glory days of the grindhouse

Not Quite Hollywood (MA 15+) 3½ stars National release SINCE Mark Hartley's entertaining and informative documentary Not Quite Hollywood opened the Melbourne Film Festival a few weeks ago, a great deal has been written and discussed about Australian exploitation cinema.

Not Quite Hollywood

Not Quite Hollywood (MA 15+) 3½ stars National release SINCE Mark Hartley's entertaining and informative documentary Not Quite Hollywood opened the Melbourne Film Festival a few weeks ago, a great deal has been written and discussed about Australian exploitation cinema.

Film critics of the 1970s have been accused of favouring arty Australian films -- Picnic at Hanging Rock, My Brilliant Career -- over the audience-delighting Barry McKenzie and Alvin Purple comedies. But this is only partly true and perhaps needs to be placed in context.

Very few genuinely Australian films had been made in this country since 1940 when a combination of two factors at the beginning of the '70s saw a resurgence of local cinema. One was the liberation of film censorship, by customs minister Don Chipp, after lengthy lobbying led by the Melbourne and Sydney film festivals, resulting in the introduction of the R classification in 1971; the other was the introduction by the Gorton government of funding for the film industry after lobbying by Barry Jones, Peter Coleman, Phillip Adams, Anthony Buckley and others. Suddenly Australian audiences were able to see films virtually uncensored after years in which mild expletives and any kind of nudity had been excised; and censorship was far more prevalent than most people realised because it was carried out in secret. In the wake of the sexual revolution, local filmmakers eagerly set out to take advantage of the new morality.

It goes without saying that some of these films were better than others, and that while there's a lot to enjoy in cheerfully non-PC ocker romps such as The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and Alvin Purple, probably not even their makers would claim they were great movies. Film critics of the time rightly, I think, sought some kind of artistic standards; audiences supported the Australian equivalent of the naughty knickers school of cinema, but surely we could aspire to something better? No wonder Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi, Gillian Armstrong and more often than not the unpredictable Bruce Beresford were celebrated. And the artistic Australian films they made were also very popular with local audiences and screened successfully overseas, winning awards and kudos.

A vast amount of exploitation cinema was produced in the '70s and '80s. Hartley's film is packed with well-chosen excerpts that are a reminder that full frontal nudity was quite common then, and the actors who participated in such scenes have been persuaded to talk, with disarming frankness, about them. In addition to the sex films, Hartley explores some impressive action films: back in the day when the skilful and talented director Brian Trenchard-Smith worked with the amazing stuntman Grant Page, the results could be eye-popping. Quentin Tarantino is a fan of this strand of Australian cinema and he makes a typically enthusiastic, cheerfully uncritical contribution.

Through the excerpts, it becomes clearer which of the filmmakers of the period had talent: George Miller's Mad Max stands head and shoulders above Sandy Harbutt's not dissimilar, heavy-handed Stone; Richard Franklin's films, despite sometimes questionable casting decisions, are stillvery effective thrillers; Russell Mulcahy's Razorback, apart from the slightly dodgy giant porker, is a splendid thriller. Not Quite Hollywood will open many eyes and I hope will encourage distributors of DVDs to release as many as possible of the so far unreleased films included here. They may not be masterpieces but,as Hartley makes clear, they're quintessentially Australian.