Published 2016 on Down Under Flix
Director: Chris Löfvén
Director: Chris Löfvén
Stars: Joy Dunstan, Bruce Spence, Michael Carman, Gary Waddell
The
Wizard of Oz,
Victor Fleming’s 1939 film based on the first of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, is a beloved
movie. It’s not just a classic children’s film, but one of that great crop of
late 30s/early 40s movies – along with Gone
with the Wind, Mr
Smith Goes to Washington, The
Adventures of Robin Hood, Stagecoach, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, and so on – that
epitomized the very best of the Hollywood machine (a machine which, as several
of these troubled productions including The
Wizard of Oz attest, was at times a gruelling, erratic beast).
The world of Oz has had a robust afterlife and its 1970s and 80s
offshoots are especially interesting. They include the
African-American musical The
Wiz, which became a flick directed by Sidney Lumet starring Diana
Ross and Michael Jackson; Walter Murch’s dark sequel Return to Oz; and the much
lesser known Australian film Oz,
subtitled A Rock ‘n Roll
Road Movie, directed by Chris Löfvén with music by Ross Wilson,
Wayne Burt, Baden Hutchins, and Gary Young.
Dorothy
(Joy Dunstan) is a teenage girl living in a rural area. She’s unhappy at
school, forced to attend by her uncle and aunt, and yearns for greater things.
Late one night following a gig by rock ‘n roll group Wally and the Falcons,
Dorothy is involved in a car accident. She wanders dazed from the scene and
collapses unconscious. On waking up she wanders into a desolate small town,
where she’s gifted a pair of ruby slippers from a camp shopkeeper (Robin
Ramsay) and urged to take the trek to the big city to see the final performance
of music superstar The Wizard (Graham Matters). And so her journey begins…
In
his introduction to the film on its Umbrella Entertainment DVD release,
director Löfvén recalls of the movie’s origins:
I’d
read a comment by some famous Hollywood producer that all the best stories had
been told, and the only difference was in the telling. I wanted to make a road
movie with rock music, but make it very Australian, very Oz. And then it hit
me: The Wizard of Oz.
How cool would it be to take that classic story and transpose it into a
contemporary Australian situation?
While
the Oz of Victor Fleming’s film is a brightly coloured, exquisitely
art-directed fantasy land that’s visually differentiated from the dreary,
sepia-coloured Kansas setting that opens the film, Löfvén and company don’t
really spice up or heighten their version of Oz; it’s technically just 1970s
Australia, though that’s probably sufficiently exotic for international audiences.
But the plot closely follows the beats of Fleming’s film, with Dorothy
travelling the asphalt highway (rather than the yellow brick road) to the big
city and encountering Australian stand-ins for The Wizard of Oz’s colourful cast of characters along
the way.
Dorothy’s
yellow brick road equivalent is the sort of desolate outback highway we’d see
Max Rockatansky’s V8 Interceptor speed down in just a few years, so it’s
fitting that there’s a Road
Warrior alum in the cast. Bruce Spence, authentically
Scarecrow-ish most of the time, plays Oz’s
Scarecrow surrogate, a dopey hippie surfer. Spence is an actor who can go broad
– like, really really broad – but he’s low key and
chilled here. Michael Carman as the film’s Tin Man figure (a motor
mechanic thoroughly lacking in empathy) and Gary Waddell as Oz’s Cowardly Lion
equivalent (a motorcyclist who talks a tough game but wouldn’t even be
cannon fodder for the Grave Diggers in Stone)
go broader and do the lion’s share (pun intended) of overacting. The film’s
Wicked Witch-style antagonist, meanwhile, is a sleazy moustachioed truck driver
in a blue singlet, and there’s a touch of Duel to his pursuit of Dorothy. The actor
playing the villain is terrifically named – Ned Kelly – but is wooden and
expressionless, the human equivalent of a meat pack won in an RSL raffle.
Nonetheless, that stiffness invests him with a certain menace: think bogan
Terminator.
The
gender politics on display in Oz are
fairly par the course for this era of Australian cinema, with enthusiastic
feminist tidings sitting alongside ingrained, reflex patriarchal
sentiments. This is exemplified in contemporary-set commercially-minded fare like Patrick and Snapshot. Here, Dorothy wants a better life for herself
and sets off to find it, and the film celebrates her breaking the small
town shackles. But her journey is to
see a magical guy, initiated by another magical
guy, and on the road she’s preyed upon by lusting men: not only the menacing
truck driver, but the mechanic and motorcyclist on their initial encounters.
She’s also kidnapped and requires rescuing from the truck driver, and
eventually is used and discarded by The Wizard. This renders her big city
adventure a major letdown, ultimately teaching her the true value of her
friends and family. Whilst older films should always be considered in their
original cultural context and not automatically judged or dismissed based on
more enlightened modern perspectives (except if those works are particularly
obnoxious or hateful: The
Birth of a Nation deserves all the judgment in the world),
it’s hard to ignore this thick coat of patriarchy. But like I said,
progressive-in-some-respects/conservative-in-others was par the course
in this era, plus Dorothy’s arc is inherently bound to its source text.
Despite the character’s passivity, Joy Dunstan is an engaging as a contemporary
Antipodean Dorothy.
The
film makes good use of its locations and taps into that same infatuation with
the open road expressed in American films of the period like Easy Rider. It also
exhibits Australia’s own infatuation with car and bike culture exemplified
in films of the era, though with significantly fewer vehicular collisions than
Ozploitation flicks like Mad
Max, Chain
Reaction, Stone and
their ilk. The music, like the film itself, is very much an artifact of its
time, with some memorable tunes (most notably Ross Wilson’s signature “Livin’
in the Land of Oz”) and others that are more functional but well-matched to the
story and tone.
A product of its time aesthetically, musically and
culturally, Oz is
nonetheless unique and on novelty alone is worth a watch.
Ben Kooyman