Mad Max (1979) - film review

In the not too distant future, law and order has begun to breakdown amid a worldwide oil shortage.  A gang of bike-riding psychopaths are terrorising south-east Australia, killing and looting with wild abandon.  The resources of the Federal police are stretched in dealing with such outlaws but they finally succeed in arresting gang member Nightrider.  The killer manages to escape police custody and a frantic road chase ensues, which ends with Nightrider being burned alive when he crashes into a van.   Another member of the gang, Johnny, is picked up by officer Max Rockatansky, but is later released through lack of evidence.  Johnny is then coerced by the gang’s sadistic leader Toecutter into setting fire to an upturned police car in which cop Jim Goose is trapped.  When he sees Goose’s charred remains, Max decides he has had enough and is ready to quit.  His boss persuades him to take a vacation and so Max heads off to the coast with his wife Jessie and their infant son.  Toecutter’s gang happens to be in the vicinity and, after a standoff at a remote farmhouse, they viciously run Jessie and her son down on a deserted stretch of highway.   Max has no better incentive now to go after Toecutter and his gang and put an end to their reign of terror.  Max is mad, very mad, and he wants blood...

Mad Max is the best-known film to come out of Australia and remains, to this date, the country’s most visually arresting offering in the action-thriller genre.  The blockbuster scale and quality of its now almost legendary action sequences (which include some of the most spectacular car chases ever shot) belie the fact that the film was made on a paltry budget (of around 350,000 Australian dollars).  The low production cost necessitated the use of real locations, and it is this which gives the film its haunting dystopian feel, a palpable sense of a society which is on the brink of falling apart and descending into animal savagery.  The dusty weather-beaten farm buildings, the ominously silent small towns and the endless expanse of flat Australian landscape all convey the impression of a civilisation that is in a state of irreversible decline.  An appropriate backdrop for a brutal revenge thriller in which an honest cop and family man is transformed into a soulless killing machine.

Remarkably, Mad Max was George Miller’s first feature as a director.  He and his producer/co-screenwriter Byron Kennedy had previously collaborated on a short film Violence in the Cinema, Part 1 eight years earlier, which Miller was prompted to make whilst he was a medical doctor.  Miller’s main inspiration was the classic American western and he adopts many of the motifs of the genre (notably the tension-building long shot) to give his film maximum visual impact.  This was the first Australian film to be shot with a widescreen anamorphic lens, something which allows the forbidding landscape to become an essential component of the narrative.  Unable to afford the luxury of a professional editing suite, Miller and Kennedy edited the film on a home-made editing machine in the latter’s bedroom.  Other cost cutting measures include painting and re-painting cars, to create the illusion there were more than there actually were, and issuing cheap vinyl outfits to the actors playing the cops - the budget would only stretch to one genuine leather outfit, which naturally went to Gibson.

The similarity with the classic western is most noticeable in the on-going private feud between Max and his nemesis Toecutter, which culminates in a final adrenalin-charged road duel, redolent of an old-fashioned shoot out.  Yet, unlike in most westerns, the delineation between the good guy and bad guy is more thinly drawn, and disappears altogether by the time we get to the final spine-chilling shot of the victor.  In the end, both Max and Toecutter seem equally possessed by the psychotic need to kill, and the apparently morally superior cop emerges as the more sadistic of the two.  Max’s understandable need for justice drives him into the prohibited zone, in more ways than one, and transforms him into a virtual carbon copy of the monster he seeks to destroy.

Mad Max is more closely aligned with the psycho-thriller horror films of the late 1970s, early 1980s than with the conventional crime-thriller genre.  The film has even been likened to a Gothic horror film, with Max and Toecutter the latest incarnations of Van Hesling and Dracula, locked in mortal combat in a classic tale of good versus evil.  Certainly, the sequences in which Toecutter’s gang go after Max’s wife and child and savagely murder them has a striking resonance with the early American slasher films.  Miller and his cinematographer David Eggby invest these sequences with maximum menace, skilfully using low angle shots and subjective tracking shots to suggest an omnipresent lurking evil.  

Much of the horror is suggested, rather than shown, and this is what makes the film particularly nerve-wracking and viscerally shocking in places.  Whilst Mad Max is shot virtually entirely in the open, in the lush sunlit Australian landscape, there is a darkly claustrophobic feel to it, which is achieved through some truly inventive camerawork and editing.  Brian May’s dramatic score, which swells to ludicrously operatic proportions in some places, also imbues the film with a sense of barely contained menace.  If this is a horror film then the real threat does not come from Toecutter but from Max’s darker inner self, something that has the power to transform a decent cop into a mindless killer.  This is more Jekyll and Hyde than Dracula.

Mad Max is the film that catapulted the unknown 23 year-old Australian actor Mel Gibson to stardom.  The actor had previously appeared in episodes of the Australian TV soap The Sullivans but would soon become one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars.  Gibson hardly needs to act in this film.  His presence - silent, brooding, intense - is enough to define his character and contributes much to the subtly menacing aura of the film.  Gibson’s contribution is perfectly complemented by an equally arresting performance from Hugh Keays-Byrne, who is chilling as the understated psychopath Toecutter.  The fact that both actors underplay their parts is probably what makes the film so intensely gripping and disturbing.  Little is revealed about either of their characters and yet the subtle performances seem to say everything about who they are and what makes them tick.   

Once the film proved to be a hit in Australia, Mad Max was given an international release (although, bizarrely, it was dubbed by American actors for its US screening).  It wasn’t until the 1981 release of its sequel - Mad Max 2, aka The Road Warrior - that the film become a global hit, grossing over 100 million dollars and becoming one of the most profitable films of all time.  A second sequel Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) completed the trilogy, although rumours of a fourth film have persisted for the past few decades.  Will Max return?  Only time will tell.

© Alex Sullivan 2010

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