The Last Wave (1977)

          Australian filmmaker Peter Weir made this enigmatic movie as the follow-up to his first international success, the moody drama Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), and The Last Wave ventures even further into the realm of dark fantasy than its predecessor. Filled with dream sequences, jarring sound effects, perplexed characters, and unexplained phenomena, The Last Wave rides the same trippy groove as many of David Lynch’s movies. It’s telling that Weir shifted into more conventional storytelling after making The Last Wave, generating such intense dramas as The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) and Witness (1985); although those pictures integrate atmosphere just as strongly as the director’s early oddities, Weir clearly found his niche as dramatist, rather than as a fantasist.

          Anyway, The Last Wave features a most unlikely leading man, tightly wound TV heartthrob Richard Chamberlain, as a Australian lawyer drawn into an odd criminal case at the same time the island nation is plagued by strange weather. And since the hero defends four Aboriginals, the storyline includes a heady dose of mysticism and premonition, as seen through the prism of the ongoing culture clash that’s inherent to the texture of post-Colonial Australia. Oh, and all of this is squished into the cinematic framework of a thriller—sort of—because The Last Wave exists somewhere on the loose continuum between drama and horror. When the story begins, several Aboriginals get into a brawl at a pub, ending in a death. David (Chamberlain), a tax lawyer who doesn’t normally handle criminal matters, is enlisted to represent the surviving Aboriginals, and this triggers a strange spiral in David’s orderly existence. In the course of investigating the crime—and attempting to understand the weird meteorological happenings plaguing Australia—David transitions from the comforting world of rational explanations to the frightening zone of metaphysical mysteries.

          Weir, who co-wrote the picture with Tony Morphett and Petru Popsecu, paints himself into one narrative corner after another—and whether he actually extricates himself from these traps is a highly subjective matter. Clearly averse to providing tidy explanations, Weir generates a series of cryptic signifiers, often presenting long stretches of screen time without dialogue. Very soon into the movie’s running time, it becomes challenging to differentiate what’s “really” happening from what’s occurring inside the protagonist’s mind. Therefore, by the end of the movie, it’s tough to determine whether the narrative has reached a personal apocalypse or an actual apocalypse.

          One wonders whether all of this would have been more effective with a defter actor in the leading role, because while Chamberlain valiantly simulates existential panic and general intensity, he fails to define David as a distinctive character. Conversely, Aboriginal actor David Gulpill (of Walkabout fame) brings an effective level of mystery to his performance as one of the accused men, since his character represents a native culture that white men like David will never fully understand. The Last Wave is an interesting ride, but the movie demands great patience on the part of the viewer. Growing steadily more opaque with each passing scene, the film dives deep into dark water and never looks back.

The Last Wave: FREAKY

Mad Dog Morgan (1976)

          A low-budget Australian effort noteworthy for the presence of Hollywood leading man Dennis Hopper, Mad Dog Morgan offers an Ozzie spin on the cliché of the antihero outlaw. Based on the real-life exploits of John Fuller, a criminal who operated under aliases including “Daniel Morgan” in mid-19th-century Australia, the picture romanticizes certain elements of the protagonist while still depicting his violence in a vivid way. Morgan was a “bushranger,” living in the wild and subsisting on loot from robberies. He also developed a fierce reputation for the savagery of which he was capable when inebriated.

          Director/cowriter Philippe Mora elicits early sympathy for Morgan by featuring a prologue in which the character is brutalized while imprisoned. The image of Morgan getting branded is hard to shake, and the abuse he suffers behind bars goes a long way toward explaining why he subsequently shuns law and order. Whether this portrayal accurately reflects the real Morgan’s character is open to debate, but the strategy works on a narrative level: Even as Morgan becomes more and more dangerous, we recall why he resents authority and values his freedom.

          Hopper was ingenious casting, since his work in Easy Rider (1969) made him an icon for the rebel spirit of the counterculture era, and he gives one of his most disciplined ’70s performances here. It’s possible that having to maintain a pidgin Irish/Australian accent forced Hopper to concentrate on his dialogue instead of tumbling off into formless improvisation, but whatever the case, he’s ferocious and focused from start to finish.

          The movie’s plotting is rather ordinary, the usual business of a crook forming unexpected alliances and outsmarting pursuers until an inevitable showdown, so what makes Mad Dog Morgan arresting, aside from Hopper’s performance, is the movie’s rich Australian texture. Shot on location by cinematographer Mike Molloy, the film’s widescreen images present untamed regions of the land down under as a striking alternative to the familiar settings of Hollywood-made outlaw pictures. Lit naturalistically and shot on grainy film, Molloy’s frames feel like vintage photographs come to life. Furthermore, an ominous soundtrack featuring the eerie aboriginal wind instrument called the didgeridoo gives Mad Dog Morgan an otherworldly air.

          The supporting cast is fine but not spectacular, though Ozzie stalwart Jack Thompson contributes his usual commanding presence in the small role of Morgan’s main pursuer, and Aboriginal actor David Gulpill (Walkabout) is amiably enigmatic as Morgan’s outback sidekick. (Gulpill also performs the soundtrack’s didgeridoo music.) Thanks to strong execution elevating potentially humdrum material, Mad Dog Morgan offers an exotic new spin on a durable genre.

Mad Dog Morgan: GROOVY