Written with economist James McCausland, Mad Max reflected global fears born of the 1973 OPEC crisis and the statistic that the last of the world's great oil fields had been discovered in the mid-1960s. " Alongside director Miller, producer Byron Kennedy and star Mel Gibson, credit must also go to editors Cliff Hayes and Tony Paterson, whose cutting is (as scholar Ross Gibson claims in South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia), "better tuned than any pursuit vehicle."Īfter a couple of short subjects funded by state grants, Miller (a former physician) and producing partner Byron Kennedy spent three years trying to secure financing for their feature film debut. Asserting itself like an alpha (and likely rabid) dog and rocketing forward like "a fuel-injected suicide machine" (to quote one of its more out-there characters), Mad Max rarely drops out of high gear, becoming (as the critic for Variety put it) "the most audience-involving film since Halloween. The genius of Mad Max is its refusal to shiver in the shade of its influences. Death" and "Toad") while Peter Weir's The Cars That Ate Paris (US: The Cars That Eat People, 1974) was the gnarly tale of an Outback hamlet whose twisted natives cause road accidents in order to profit from the plunder. Sandy Harbutt's Sydney-set Stone (1974) was an earlier Aussie genre hybrid that welded the motorcycle film to murder mystery and the cop-infiltrates-gang thrillers ( Mad Max actors Roger Ward, Hugh Keays-Byrne and Vincent Gil even appear as bikers sporting the comic book monikers "Hooks," "Dr. Certainly true, the groundbreaking Australian biker flick-cum-apocalypse fable was influenced by the American westerns writer-director George Miller had seen as a child ( High Noon (1952) comes immediately to mind, as do the Italo-westerns of Sergio Leone), along with such cult classics as The Wild One (1953) and A Boy and His Dog (1975). " Mad Max is a movie made by and for film buffs," John McCarty wrote in 1997 for The Films of Mel Gibson.
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