Title: Stone
Director: Sandy HarbuttReleased: 1974
Starring: Ken Shorter, Sandy Harbutt, Helen Morse, Roger Ward, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Vincent Gill, Bindi Williams, Dewey Hungerford, Rebecca Gilling
Plot: Police officer Stone (Shorter) goes undercover with
the Gravediggers, an outlaw motorcycle gang to find out who is murdering their members.
Released five years before the first of the “Mad Max” films,
which several the cast would also go on to appear in, this film would also have
the honour of being the first Australian biker movie, which considering what
gear heads Australian audiences are really makes it all the more surprising
that no one made one earlier. At the same time the Ozploitation era would
frequently be responsible for so many of firsts like this including giving the
world Australia’s first Kung fu movie with “The Man From Hong Kong”. Sadly
though despite this legacy the film has largely been forgotten and no doubt I
too wouldn’t have known about it like so many films in the genre had it not
been for the truly essential documentary “Not Quite Hollywood” which equally
served to provide a handy watch list for the Ozploitation genre aswell as
countless stories to highlight the indie film making methods being used to make
them.
Opening with not only with some seriously trippy visuals as one of the bikers witnesses the assassination of a politician while on a serious acid trip, but some fun bike porn for those of you who like your motorcycles as the Gravediggers roll out on old school Kawasaki’s (according to Wikipedia) with the opening credits being made up of sudden freeze frame shots of different parts of the motorcycle as the rider prepares for a ride. From here we get to watch various members of the Gravediggers being taken off in a variety of creative ways including the old wire decapitation aswell as an incredible cliff jump. While these moments are fun they are then completely overshadowed by arguably the best scene of the whole film with a biker funeral precession complete with motorcycle and sidecar coffin and a line of bikers which never seems to end, as some four hundred bikers turned out to help with the filming of the scene.
The downside of this scene appearing so close to the start
though is that the rest of the film never manages to better it, especially as
the pace becomes more sedate with Stone slowly earning the trust of the
Gravediggers while at the same time becoming ever more drawn into their outlaw
lifestyle, which here Harbutt chooses to show as being less anarchic in nature
than other biker films and instead showing the group living in an almost hippie
commune style situation. Equally interesting is the fact that Stone openly
admits to being a police officer from the start, rather than the film taking
the more well-travelled road of him hiding his true identity and finding a way
into the gang. This honesty does as a result create an almost anthropological
style situation, as the bikers immediately distrust Stone due to him being a
cop and hence the embodiment of everything they despise. The scenes which
follow all charting the slowly increasing trust he earns from the group by participating
in gang brawls and from his riding skills all the while finding himself slowly
being increasingly drawn to their lifestyle the more he learns about them. This
is of course only further helped by the Gravediggers being slightly deeper than
your usual bikers as highlighted during the scene where they share their stories
of what brought them all together, with the majority of them taking on the
outlaw lifestyle due to delusion with various aspects of society, with most
falling under hot topics of the period.
While Harbutt might not here be focused on the usual biker
antics he does however still give us a fair few including a parking lot brawl
with a rival biker gang. What is especially interesting about these scenes
though is trying to figure how much of the action was planned, seeing how
Harbutt recruited a number of real bikers for the film who he was also paying
in beer leading unsurprisingly to a number of fights breaking out on set, with
the situation only being further antagonised by Roger Ward who for some reason
thought it would be a good idea to call the local Hell’s Angels chapter a bunch
of poofters from the hotel balcony. Harbutt aswell was a big fan of the group
being believable in their roles and insisted on the group living embracing their
roles as much as possible which saw them living the biker lifestyle throughout
filming, a situation which also reportedly made it far from a fun set for the
female cast members many of which complaining of being objectified throughout
filming.
While it might be now more overshadowed by the “Mad Max”
films this is still an enjoyable movie, even if its opening fifteen minutes is
misleading as to what the rest of the film will be like, especially with the
earlier mentioned funeral scene but it ensures that while the tone for the
majority of the film is pretty sedate that it still saves a jaw dropping surprise
for the ending! True it might be a very different biker movie and more for the completest
than the casual viewer, but as a curious watch the set pieces alone make it a
worthwhile watch.
No comments:
Post a Comment