Published 2017 on Down Under Flix
Discounting the film Blackfellas, in which he plays a minor role as a racist policeman, I’m surprised it’s taken this long to cover any John Hargreaves films on Down Under Flix. A six time AFI Award nominee (including for Hoodwink) and triple winner, Hargreaves is one of the best leading men to emerge from the Australian New Wave, and I have particular regard for his work in Don’s Party, Long Weekend, and The Odd Angry Shot. Hargreaves was a natural performer: gifted and charismatic, but not unnecessarily flashy; handsome, but not movie star handsome, and slightly crumpled like a creased jacket. He was a quintessential Australian everyman ala Jack Thompson and Bryan Brown, though he’s less familiar to young filmgoers today, partly due to his untimely passing in 1996 at age 50. This article looks at one of Hargreaves’ best films… and one of his other films…
Hoodwink
Director: Claude Whatham
Starring: John Hargreaves, Judy Davis, Wendy Hughes, Kim Deacon,
Dennis Miller, Max Cullen, Michael Caton, Geoffrey Rush, Wendy Strehlow, Colin
Friels
1981’s Hoodwink sports one of the
grooviest title logos of all time (see below) and casts Hargreaves as career
criminal and Casanova Martin Stang. After a series of amusing close encounters
of the law kind, Stang is finally arrested and imprisoned. He pretends to go
blind, persuading the authorities to go easy on him and place him in a minimum
security facility, where he romances Sarah (Judy Davis), the wife of a
sympathetic pastor.
The
plot of Hoodwink is based on real events
in the life of Carl Synnerdahl, a convict who conned with remarkable conviction
to get out of prison. The inspiration for the film, however, was not impressed with the finished product, reflecting that “It was a shit movie … The guy
who played me [Hargreaves] was six foot two for a start … Claude Whatham, the
director, was bought out from England with no knowledge of the Australian way
of life or the idiom. All he wanted to do, I found out later, was have naked
women in front of the camera! I didn’t even want any sex in the movie, it’s not
what it was about”. While I disagree with Synnerdahl’s assessment of the film
and Hargreaves’ performance, actress Kim Deacon concurs in a documentary on the
film’s DVD release that director Whatham had some pervy inclinations, and
that’s substantiated onscreen in nude scenes featuring Deacon and elsewhere
Wendy Hughes, though these moments are consistent with the liberal, earthy
spirit of the 1970s Australian sex comedies.
Hoodwink is another entry in the
canon of counter-culture-minded Australian films featuring battler anti-heroes
going against and getting the better of the authorities. Ned Kelly (reviewed here) and Mr Reliable (reviewed here)
also feature in this sub-genre and are similarly derived from true events.
However, the charming Stang isn’t quite as sympathetic an anti-hero as Kelly
or Mr
Reliable’s
Wally Mellish, and there are pointed references to the collateral damage left
in Stang’s wake: his broken relationships with Sarah, Lucy (Hughes), and Marion
(Deacon); his parents assaulted at the hands of the police; his pastor
interrogated and suspected of being an accomplice, and so on. While Hargreaves
may have been the wrong height, he delivers a terrific star performance as the
rascally, roguish, and ultimately morally ambivalent Stang, and he’s supported
ably by Davis, Hughes, Deacon and a sturdy supporting cast, including early
turns from Geoffrey Rush and Michael Caton. Praise is also due to
cinematographer Dean Semler. His photography here is crisp and clean, and over
the next decade he’d do exemplary work on the second and third Mad Max films, Razorback, The Lighthorsemen, Dead Calm, and kick off the 1990s with
an Oscar for Dances with Wolves (before proceeding to build one of the most perplexing and workmanlike IMDb CVs in Hollywood).
Sky Pirates
Director: Colin Eggleston
Starring: John Hargreaves, Meredith Phillips, Max Phipps, Bill
Hunter
Aside
from a supporting role in Cry Freedom, Richard Attenborough’s 1987 film about activist Steve Biko and
journalist Donald Woods in apartheid-era South Africa, Hargreaves never really
appeared in a major international film. On paper, Sky Pirates could have made
Hargreaves an overseas commodity. On celluloid, it’s an embarrassment, but not
of riches. Subsequently dubbed by producer and writer John D. Lamond as Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Shit, Sky Pirates was one of many
internationally-minded genre films produced in the 1980s under 10BA tax
incentives. Its kin includes the likes of Harlequin, Race for the Yankee Zephyr, and The Return of Captain
Invincible (review
coming soon), all films which rejected Australian settings and stories in
favour of transatlantic accents, non-descript geography, and that most
universal of movie languages: action. You can read here to
find out more about this era, but suffice to say this phase of Australian
cinema isn’t thought of too favourably: David Stratton, looking back over the 10BA era,
laments “I think we just made too many bad films and we lost that audience
[built during the 1970s]”. Of course, bad films were not unique to Australia in
that period, and nor were bad Indiana Jones rip-offs. These were quite
commonplace in the 1980s, and for every ripper yarn like Romancing the Stone there was a High Road to China starring almost-Indy
Tom Selleck, or King Solomon’s Mines courtesy of Canon Films. Sky Pirates is of interest as
Australia’s own spin on this pulp adventure formula, but not for much else.
Sky
Pirates’
prologue establishes that aliens visited Earth as far back as prehistoric times
and left behind monuments of their presence (e.g. the Pyramids, the Easter
Island statues). The film kicks off proper during World War II, with ace pilot
Lieutenant Harris (Hargreaves) crashing his plane in a Bermuda Triangle-esque
area near Easter Island. Harris is found but his cargo – a theologian and ancient
artefact – go missing, so Harris teams with the reverend’s daughter (Meredith
Phillips) to locate his passenger and the artefact before it’s appropriated for
ill purposes. While it blatantly rips off Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s worth noting
that Sky Pirates predates Indiana Jones and the
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and its pairing of aliens and their archaeological mementos by
over 20 years, not to mention predating the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its
presentation of mystical McGuffins in disparate places with the power to wreak
havoc once combined.
Producer
and writer John D. Lamond is a wonderfully droll, skeezy character as evidenced
in his interview segments from Mark Hartley’s Ozploitation documentary Not Quite Hollywood. As the mastermind behind Australia After Dark and other smutty
features capitalising on the relaxed Australian censorship of the 1970s, he
and Hoodwink’s Claude Whatham would
probably have gotten along well. As it stands, directing duties for
Lamond’s Sky
Pirates script
fell to Colin Eggleston, who previously directed Hargreaves in survival
thriller Long
Weekend. Sky Pirates is a marked downgrade
from that exceptional film for both star and director, hampered considerably by
its generic style and chintzy production value. Aping Raiders of the Lost Ark is innately a fool’s
errand, but aping the best of the Hollywood machine without all the bells and
whistles and affordances of said machine only adds to the uphill battle. To the
filmmakers’ credit, Sky Pirates works admirably and valiantly within its constraints,
using lighting and shadows and close-ups to mask the limitations of its sets
and its air, land, and sea action. But there’s a definite ceiling on
propulsion: in a car chase midway through the film, there are maybe a couple of
shots showing the two cars moving along the same road at the same time.
Hargreaves
is good and walks away mostly unscathed, but is perhaps a smidgen too old for
the role at 41. Yes, I’m aware that Harrison Ford was 42 when Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom came
out, and that only a year before Sky Pirates a 58-year-old Roger Moore enjoyed his last, leisurely
adventure as James Bond in A View to a Kill. But the leaner, hungrier Hargreaves of a decade earlier would
have been a better fit. Others in the slumming cast include Bill Hunter and Max
Phipps, best known for The Road Warrior and responsible for essaying a very fine performance as
Gough Whitlam in television’s The Dismissal. Another veteran of The Road Warrior, composer Brian May (not Queen’s
Brian May, but an accomplished composer nonetheless with some terrific
Ozploitation scores to his credit), apes John Williams’ Indy theme and likewise
wages a losing battle. Sky Pirates is one of the weakest films covered on Down Under Flix in
recent memory. For Hargreaves newbies, stick to Hoodwink or some of the other
key films and performances singled out at the start of this article.
Ben Kooyman