70 Years Ago: Dial M For Murder (1954)

Director Alfred Hitchcock is up to his trademark diabolical tricks in Dial M For Murder (1954), a restless, yet highly-focused adaptation of Frederick Knott's hit stage play. The movie shares something in common with Rope (1948) in that the action is confined primarily to one claustrophobic location: an apartment suite in London.

As in Knott's original work, Hitchcock's film follows anti-hero Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) as he plots to murder his beautiful wife, Margot (Grace Kelly). Although the charming, erudite Wendice hardly seems perturbed -- let alone enraged -- with his wife over the moral trespass he discovered (an extra-marital affair), he nonetheless commissions (or rather, blackmails...) a shady college acquaintance, Swann (Anthony Dawson) into performing the terrible deed. The end game: Tony wants the money in Margot's will.

Wendice recruits Swann, I might add, by applying inescapable, Aristotelian logic. And his entire attitude with Swann is unswervingly dispassionate, but firm. He lets the facts speak for him, in other words. Wendice is thus revealed to be an exceedingly clever tactician, one with a clockwork mind and total understanding of all angles of the crime. He puts the screws of manipulation to Swann with a relentlessness - and charm - that is shocking, yet also strangely fun.

Watching the scene involving Wendice's manipulation of Swann, you will find yourself absolutely entranced by the writing, not to mention the performances. The scene misses nothing -- leaving no stone unturned -- and the dialogue and delivery are unerringly sharp. And when the film arrives at the specifics of the murder plot, Hitchcock cuts to and then remains with a high angle shot for an uncomfortably long duration. This selection of camera angles boasts two primary meanings. First, it distances us, in a sense, from the two men plotting evil. Secondly, the high angle (always a cinematic indicator of doom or entrapment), indicates that this plan will be the undoing for both men. Ultimately, that is indeed the case.

The lovely Margot, it turns out, was unfaithful to Tony with an American crime writer named Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings), and the real motive behind the murder, I suggest is not merely the money in the will, but the fact that Margot is -- literally -- a different woman with Mark than she is with Tony. And yes, I mean that in the Biblical sense. With Tony, Margot is demure, virginal, (and to establish this, Hitchcock has her dress primarily in white).

By contrast, In the clutches of passion with Mark, Margot is more overtly sexual and passionate, a personality change made clear by her decision to adorn a fiery red dress. I get the feeling that Tony is murderous not so much because his wife cheated, but because Mark brings out the lustful, sexual side of Margot. Tony is intellectual, cunning, but Mark is macho and hot blooded. He can't stand that Margot would gravitate to Tony.

On the night of the planned murder, Tony has arranged the perfect alibi. He's going to be with Mark (yes, Margot's lover!) at a stag party, while Swann -- using Margot's front door key -- sneaks into the apartment and strangles her with a stocking. Tony telephones at the very moment of Swann's ambush (hence the "dial M" aspect of the title), and hears the vicious scuffle. But Swann bungles the attack, and Margot manages to stab her attacker in the back with a very sharp pair of scissors. In a terrific (and macabre) moment, Swann lands on the floor, back first, and the scissors - pressured by the floor - push deeply into his back, all the way up to the hilt.

And I must say, this is the moment in which Dial M For Murder goes from being an involving thriller to an experience you can't take your eyes off of.

Realizing that his plan has gone horribly awry, Tony -- using that unnatural calm and icy intellect -- begins to adjust to the situation on the fly. When he realizes Swann has failed in murder, Tony switches strategy and sets up Margot as Swann's murderer. She is arrested by Inspector Hubbard (John Williams) and charged with murder. Margot goes on trial (in a frugal but expressionistic sequence), is found guilty, and is promptly slated for execution.

The final scenes of the film heap irony upon irony, and Dial M For Murder successfully balances one cunning mind (Tony's) against another (Inspector Hubbard). On the former front, there's a grin-inducing scene in which Mark goes to Tony and -- desperate to save Margot from execution -- begs him to confess to Swann's murder. Mark -- the crime writer -- has even concocted a crazy story about how and why Tony would have killed Swann. What's amusing is that Mark has creatively (and with no inside knowledge) guessed correctly about almost everything. It's like a game of chess, and you sit on the edge of your seat waiting to see how and when the worm will finally turn, and Tony will be exposed.

Oddly, and perhaps counterintuitively, Milland plays the character in Dial M For Murder that we most easily sympathize with. He's a murderer, a cold fish and a cad, and yet somehow we simultaneously want him to get caught and get away with the perfect crime. Milland is ideal in this part, his eyes constantly processing -- not unlike a computer -- every new development, assimilating it, and taking it in stride. Even when he is exposed at the end, Tony seems oddly jolly and charismatic.

I don't believe that Dial M For Murder evidences the moral depth and philosophical heft of a Hitchcock film like Rope. Nor does it shatter the rules of cinematic decorum like Psycho. Nor have I pinpointed a deep and meaningful sub-text here, as is most assuredly present in a film such as The Birds (which had the attacking birds carrying out the subconscious, murderous desires of a particular character). Considering this, Dial M For Murder feels a tad lighter than some Hitchcock efforts. 

Yet by the same token, Dial M may also play as more widely accessible. Make no mistake: this is a brilliantly-written, effectively shot, wonderfully performed effort. I just don't know that it's in the top tier of Hitchcock's canon. Yet even lower-rung Hitchcock efforts are unerringly brilliant (and better than about 95% of other thrillers). So Dial M For Murder could be exactly what the doctor ordered in the hot house days of summer: a finely-balanced ballet in which a murderous man dances his way out of being caught, while others pirouette around him, attempting to discern the truth.

Abnormal Fixation: The Web Series. Production Begins!

While season two of the award-winning audio drama Enter The House Between is in post-production, I am thrilled to announce the commencement of production on my new web series, Abnormal Fixation (2024). 

We are recording six 30-minute episodes in June with the intent to air the series in the fall of 2024!

The series is a mockumentary/found footage comedy/horror series about a group of strange individuals vying in a contest to prove (or disprove...) the existence of the paranormal. 

But, of course, the real story is about human relationships, and one relationship in particular, which viewers will learn more about.

I wrote the first season, and I'll be joined on production by some of my favorite on-screen and behind-the-scene talents including Alicia and Chris Martin, Tony Mercer, Kim-Breeding Mercer, Kathryn Muir, Jim Blanton, Leslie Cossor, and a host of new friends and colleagues too.

Production officially began this weekend with Pauline Mae Allera, a talented artist who will essay the crucial role of "Chesa" in the show, and she delivered an amazing performance.  

Some photos of the shoot, and Pauline, below!

The X-Cast: The X-Files I Want to Believe (#46): "I Don't Believe This"

 I return, with host Kurt North, to discuss another moment of the 2008 film, The X-Files: I Want to Believe.

The X-Files I Want to Believe Minute (#45): What Joe Sees (with JKM)

 

I'm on The X-Cast podcast, helping out on an amazing, moment-by-moment analysis of the 2008 feature film The X-Files: I Want to Believe.

Check it out!

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

It’s been a long time since I felt physically endangered or jeopardized while watching a movie.  

That may sound silly, but the best genre movies, traditionally, have accomplished just such a feat. In these works of art, the viewer feels so immersed in the action unfolding on screen that all distance between movie and audience vanishes.  

Instead, you are there, in the thick of it, living the action moment-to-moment, holding your breath, clutching your hand-rests.

I felt that way a lot in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). 

In fact, I felt that way for two full hours. This is a movie that begins with a bang, and then never lets up till the end credits roll. In a word, the R-rated film is amazing.

There is a pervasive feeling here -- one carefully engendered and nourished by director George Miller -- that anything can happen, and anything will happen. In fact, an event that occurs about half-way through Mad Max: Fury Road -- totally unthinkable in your standard summer blockbuster fare -- shatters any illusions that you know how this film is going to turn out.  

All bets are off. 

This movie is hard-core. It is dangerous, and you feel that danger in your bones and in your brain.  At one point, as some piece of cast-off metal whizzed at the screen (and therefore, at my face) I reflexively flinched.  That’s how certain I was that I was actually, physically imperiled by the film’s demolition derby action.

I’ll put this another way.  

I’m an optimist by nature, but I wasn’t entirely certain I would ever see again another film like The Road Warrior (1982); one that pushed the envelope of decorum so far that it created -- by its sheer kinetic wake -- a whole new movie genre (the post-apocalyptic wasteland movie, for lack of a better descriptor).  

But Mad Max: Fury Road has proven me wrong.  It is not only a legitimate genre masterpiece, but one that reveals just how shallow, predictable and safe many summer blockbusters are.   

Mad Max runs over traditional movie decorum at 100 miles an hour, and then backs over it two or three times, just to make sure it’s really dead. The film is not only the equal of The Road Warrior, it is superior to that classic in just about every way imaginable.

Again, none of this happens by accident. 

Mad Max: Fury Road is, in a canny way, constructed to augment immersion and unpredictability.  Beyond the narrative/structural surprises, the vehicle/chase choreography is a thing of destructive, wild, imaginative chaos and beauty.  The film leaps from one sustained, unrelenting, gasp-provoking action scene to another and yet, miraculously, still finds time to be about the people who inhabit this world.  And on a wider terrain than that, even, this film is about humanity, or human nature, itself.

Mad Max: Fury Road spoon-feeds you nothing. There are no conversations here in which people sit down and talk about their feelings or their motivations. Some less-than-insightful folks might consider the film dumb because they aren’t specifically told how to feel, or what to think, but these individuals have given short shrift to the power of visual imagery, and director Miller’s skillful use of it.  Everything you need to know to understand the movie’s story, world, and ideas is right there, on screen, a true feast for the eyes.

And what is the film about? Nothing less than Max’s (Tom Hardy) one overriding instinct -- survival -- and the conflicts that occur when that instinct runs smack against not one, but two brick walls. 

One of those brick-walls is named Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). She is an individual who is as dedicated to her mission of “redemption” as Max is to his mission of self-preservation. 

Another, even more dangerous brick wall Max encounters here is the fanaticism that too often accompanies fundamental religious belief. 

In the film, this impediment to continued survival and civilization itself is named Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). He has set up a society that worship him as a God. People live and die by his command, and that’s exactly how he desires it.

In the last instance -- the exploration of cult fanaticism -- this Mad Max entry very much reflects our age. This is an era in which some people believe it is perfectly acceptable to burn and behead those who don’t share their restrictive, draconian ideology.  It is also an era when others believe that their personal religious convictions are more important than basic human decency, courtesy, or the ties that bind a society together. 

In both cases (one murderous, and one merely sanctimonious), zealous belief has replaced common sense, community, and the desire to erect a just world.  Mad Max: Fury Road’s depiction of this belief mind-set gone mad, in a place called the Citadel is -- like so much in the film -- unforgettable.

I’m not one for hyperbole. Indeed, if you scroll over to the side-bar featuring critic comments about me on the right side of this review, you’ll note that I was once called “ever the judicious critic.”  

Well, with that descriptor in mind, let me say simply that Mad Max: Fury Road has not only revealed how fake, flat and uninspired most summer movies are, it has given us the finest action film in the last several years, and perhaps of the 21^st century.

“We are not things! We are not things!”

Following an apocalyptic war and the end of civilization, humanity has attempted to re-assert itself in the desert. But the twisted forms it has taken are horrifying, as a wanderer in the wasteland, former police man Max (Hardy) has discovered.

One day, Max is captured by the forces of the Citadel and Immortan Joe (Keays-Byrne). This cult does not see outsiders as possessing any value, and Max is turned into a living blood bag; one servicing Immortan’s “War Boys,” whom he sends on wasteland jihads. 

In particular, Max is the blood donor for a callow youth named Nux (Nicholas Hault), who wishes for just one thing: entrance into Valhalla, the land of heroes.  To get there, he must obey Joe, and kill on his behalf. “I live. I die. I live again,” he recites, as if his words are Scripture.

When another of Joe’s people, Imperator Furiosa (Theron) leaves the Citadel in a war rig, events take a strange turn.  Furiosa has taken with her on her journey Joe’s five wives, whom he keeps locked in a vault, and is making a run for freedom. Some of the young women are pregnant.

Joe, who also keeps his people starving and thirsty, rallies all his forces to get the women back. Max becomes an unwitting part of the war party when Nux refuses to leave his blood supply behind.

After several dangerous, destructive encounters, Max and Lux end up on the war rig with Furiosa and must re-evaluate their allegiances and belief systems. 

With Joe hot on their trail, the group must decide if it can reach the mythical “Green” lands (and land of “Many Mothers”) or if it should choose a different course.

“Who Killed the World?”

At a few key junctures in Mad Max: Fury Road, we see the legend written or spoken, “who killed the world?”  

The answer, as enunciated by the film, is religious zealotry.  

What killed the world is the perverse, destructive desire of the devout to force their belief system on those who simply wish to leave in peace and freedom. 

In the real world, we have ISIS, of course, as an example of just such zealotry. Indeed, the atrocities committed by ISIS remind us that Fury Road isn’t so fantastic as to be unbelievable.  The world in the film is only a single step removed from reality, and grounded very much in the truths of today. 

Historically speaking, we know that the Mad Max movies feature an apocalypse caused by demand for oil.  And we have now waged two wars in Iraq and the wider Middle East, with different ideologies clashing, and oil fields as the coveted prize. Thus, Miller’s sci-fi world even looks more plausible today than it did thirty years ago, during the Cold War.

In the Citadel of Fury Road, those who don’t profess devout belief in Immortan Joe are literally nothing except spare parts…blood to be used by the War Boys. Their beliefs are wrong, so they are worthless as human beings. 

In the same culture, women are treated as property, and there are no families.  Some women are designated breeders, while others are nurse-maids, but all the boys are raised to be murderous warriors, never knowing the milk of human kindness that a mother (and father) can provide.  We see some women in the film, pumping breast milk, but it is just a commodity, not something to be shared in a family.  The women and the War Boys don’t mingle.

The boys exist not to be human, but to kill and conquer, and convert more followers to Joe’s holy cause.  The Citadel, then, is a theocracy, a metropolis where religious belief dictates all decisions.  If you believe, you fight for Joe without question.  If you believe, you breed for Joe without question. 

But if you don’t believe, you are worthless except that your precious blood may of value to one war boy or another.

This dynamic reflects the religious world view that God has chosen a particular people, and the belief that those people are above all others in terms of value and worth.   

We see in the film how Nux -- in many ways the film’s most intriguing character -- longs to die in service of his God. He wants to die and be reborn, and then die again.  He wants to enter Valhalla as a proud, heroic warrior. He wants the blessings of his God, and will do anything to achieve that goal, even if it means snuffing out human life. This world and such matters as humanity or family matter very little to Nux.  He has been indoctrinated not to want or desire those things, only to “believe” in Joe’s divinity and to serve without question.

It is therefore, in authentic terms, heart-wrenching when Nux fails in direct eyesight of Immortan Joe. Nux slips and fails in his mission, and he sees with his own eyes Joe’s utter disdain for him.  He has disappointed his God.  He has lost all value and self-worth, and knows it cannot be retrieved.  

At this point, Nux’s journey to become a human being and not a religious slave begins in earnest. Isolated and lonely, he reaches out, a little at a time, and starts to see how belief has imprisoned him, given him only the narrowest of visions of life.  

In the end, Nux makes a choice that one might think is, ironically, in keeping with his religious beliefs (and the desire to die), but he does so because -- for the first time -- he actually cares about someone other than himself and his “God.”  He makes his final choice because he wants someone else to live, not glory in some fictional afterlife.

As I’ve written before, that’s what civilization really is.  

It isn’t taking care of your own, or sticking to a tradition you know and practice. That’s simply self-preservation.  

Civilization is what comes into being when you think of other people, and their survival, and take steps to preserve those things. 

Max undertakes a kind of parallel journey in the film.  

Here, he has forsaken so much of his humanity to survive in the wasteland. In part, this may be because of his extreme self-loathing. We know from the events of Mad Max (1979) that he undertook vengeance -- an anti-social endeavor -- even knowing the consequences of that vengeance.  He murdered those who killed his wife and son, and in the process sacrificed his humanity and civilization itself. 

When we meet him again in Fury Road (which I believe, chronologically, precedes Thunderdome, but I could be wrong…) Max is still a barbarous “thing,” a man driven only by the desire to see the next minute alive.  He is unable to trust, unable to do much of anything, in fact, save for react to attacks. 

Over the course of the film, he too starts to reach out, and sees that if man’s civilization is ever to return, that return must occur where civilization has the best chance. And for all its monstrosities and terrors, the Citadel is that place. There is green grass there.  There is water there. There are children there. Accordingly, Max convinces Furiosa to return there. They leads the war rig back to take on Joe, and reclaim the Citadel for humanity.

Furiosa is an intriguing character, but unlike either Nux or Max (and notice the similarity, please, in the names of those two male characters) she is in touch with her feelings; with her guilt and shame.  

She says she is out for “redemption,” because she has seen Joe for what he is and was still a part of his corrupt regime. She wants to escape him, and run away.  She wants to run away and not look back.

Ultimately, however, as Max proves, you can’t achieve redemption by running away.  You can only achieve it by reckoning with it at the place where the shame and guilt began.  And for Furiosa that is the home of her captors, the Citadel. As Max informs her, from personal experience: “If you can’t fix what’s broken, you’ll go insane.”  

In a very compelling way, Mad Max: Fury Road concerns three flawed characters who must open their eyes to the fact that they have been living in a destructive, anti-human way, and who therefore decide to address it by joining forces to take down the anti-human God, Joe.  Not a one of the three is perfect alone, but together…what a team they make. As dangerous as it is, they tall take one final shot at fixing what’s broken.

Some viewers have also picked up on the male/female conflicts in Mad Max: Fury Road, and attempted to state that the film is somehow anti-male, or that Furiosa assumes Max’s role as primary hero.  

I don’t believe either accusation is true. 

Furiosa and Max make a great team. She helps Max escape from danger, so that survival is not so important to him.  And he makes Furiosa return home, so that she can achieve the redemption she desires.  It is true that Furiosa, not Max, deals the death blow in the film to a significant villain, but if you look at Mad Max history, that is not entirely out of the norm.  If I remember correctly, Max never kills Auntie Entity in Thunderdome (1985), either. 

Furiosa is not better or stronger than Max, and Max is not stronger or better than Furiosa.  That’s sort of the point.  They each possess different strengths and so can work together beautifully and effectively.  Max and Nux are “reliable,” as Furiosa notes, and Max sees for himself how committed Furiosa is to saving Joe’s brides from a life of enslavement, as property.

I don’t see why it has to be a competition between Max and Furiosa, frankly.  The film provides us several great characters, especially once you factor in Nux. They are all memorable, and they all serve the story well.

The other quality that serves the story well is, as I noted in my introduction, Miller’s structuring of the screenplay.  

The most independent and head-strong of the brides, The Splendid Angharad (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) is very pregnant in the film, and she demonstrates all the qualities that would make her the movie’s perfect hero. She is smart, brave and resourceful. She is a leader. She knows that her baby must live free, and that she must do so as well.

But what happens to noble Angharad is unexpected and terrible, and totally outside the confines of Hollywood movie convention. 

Again, I repeat: she is a pregnant, mother-to-be, and a person who wants only one thing. to be free. But fate is so cruel to her and her dreams. Once Angharad meets her fate, Miller demonstrates that he is committed to his hardcore cause. He will not play Hollywood B.S. games and will not back away from taboo material. Instead, he makes his point about a world in which “believers” treat non-believers as “things” to be used, not as people.

It is a cliché, often spattered on newspaper banners, to claim that a film consists of “non-stop” action.  I shit you not when I say that Mad Max: Fury Road is non-stop action.  The film never stops moving, either literally or philosophically.  And visually, the film not only accelerates to the point of madness, it reveals, along the way, a splendid imagination in terms of characters and art design.  The war rig is a miraculous design, for instance, but it is just one such imaginative creation.  Max and Furiosa encounter a war party that drives around in giant spiked cars -- an homage to The Cars that Ate Paris (1976), perhaps? -- with wicked buzz-saw attachments. At another juncture, we see mysterious nomads on stilts navigating a swamp environment by night, and the imagery is evocative of a larger, unseen, unexplored world.   The action is spectacular on a whole new level, but the imaginative visuals go far beyond the action, and also lend support to the depiction of a (believable) world gone mad.

In future years, I hope when people ask who killed the world of safe CGI summer blockbusters, we can all answer in unison…Mad Max: Fury Road.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

In terms of narrative structure, the three Mad Max films of the 1970s-1980s (Mad Max [1979], The Road Warrior [1981] and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome [1985]) chart an interesting and highly artistic parallel trajectory. 

Both human civilization itself and Max's original persona as a decent family man collapse at approximately the same time, in the violent, emotionally-searing Mad Max. 

Then, in the absence of law and morality arises much chaos and violence (Road Warrior). Oil is scarce.  The law fails. Nobody trusts anybody on the desolate highways of the future, and survival -- not morality -- proves paramount. Max loses much of his humanity in this world, but manages to hold onto a kernel of it.    

Finally -- at last -- the process of re-building and achieving redemption begin in earnest in Beyond Thunderdome, both for the individual man, Max, and for all of mankind too There is hope. Civilization starts again, and it lights the way home for the road warriors...

It's a terrific  story/character arc, played ably and movingly across three very strong and memorable genre films.

Yet Mad Max fans still debate with passion which film in the action-packed trilogy from George Miller (and the late Byron Kennedy) remains the finest. Like many, I prefer the middle part of the trilogy, the absolutely unsentimental, unrelenting The Road Warrior, by a wide margin. 

When I reviewed that film, I called it "one of the ten great action films of the last thirty years," and highly commended "the aura of danger, anxiety and uncertainty" in the landmark, "startling" effort. 

I still feel the same way. The Road Warrior was one of those rare theatrical experiences (not unlike The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Last House on the Left) in which  actively-engaged audience members felt there was a real danger they might be see something truly unpleasant, or decorum-shattering, on screen. The movie felt downright dangerous.

Interestingly, critics and audiences tend to be sharply divided on the (for now...) final entry in the pantheon, Beyond Thunderdome. Critics, including the late Roger Ebert, praise the third film extravagantly, whereas audiences seem markedly less enthusiastic about this 1985 effort.  

I understand the reasons for both reactions, and in some ways, Beyond Thunderdome is a sharply schizophrenic film.

On the one hand, Beyond Thunderdome is a movie that vividly creates a unique and highly-cinematic world -- Bartertown -- and then memorably populates that environment with an entourage of fascinating, flamboyant characters . 

These include the sexy villain, Aunty Entity (Tina Turner), and her strange, colorful entourage. These retainers possess memorable names such as Scrooloose, Dr. Dealgood, The Collector, and Ironbar, and this element adds to the film's sense of  fun, and wickedness.

Commendably, Thunderdome also treats this one-of-a-kind world with a witty -- but not cheesy--  sense of humor, at least starting out. Even the film's dialogue in the first act is unexpectedly, unremittingly sharp.  

"You can shovel shit, can't you?"

That's all really good stuff for the film reviewers to chew on and ponder, no doubt.  And as Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome kicks in with a jolt, the pop tune by Tina Turner promises a good, dark, pacey excursion into a world we've been to before, only on a grander, more epic, more edgy scale.

But audiences -- especially those who are fans of the earlier films -- may still end up upset or disappointed with this third film because it very obviously assimilates Mad Max into the Hollywood mainstream action mold. 

Suddenly, the lone warrior of the wasteland is encountering cute, resourceful kids, fighting cartoony villains (like the aforementioned, apparently unkillable Ironbar) and even playing the white knight. That last bit (the white knight act) is a critical part of the overall story arc: Max's step-by-step return to the world of "humanity," and, yes, it must exist. By the end of the Mad Max cycle, we understand, Mad Max must no longer be "mad."

Yet it's still hard to escape the impression that -- in the Darwinian world depicted in The Road Warrior -- the Mad Max (and attached kids) we encounter in Thunderdome would simply not survive. 

And Aunty Entity would not retain control of Bartertown for long were she to -- in full view of her battle-hardened troops -- let Max survive after their final clash.  It's not just that Aunty's decision to let Max live feels like an anti-climax when we desperately desire a stirring action scene; it's that it doesn't ring entirely true with what's been established before.

And so this movie just feels...softer than the previous pictures.

So, you can sense the problem with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.  The first act is stellar, imaginative, even caustic post-apocalyptic nirvana.  The last act is pro forma Hollywood nonsense.

Janet Maslin of The New York Times termed Beyond Thunderdome "the most visually spectacular installment by far, with a few innovations - notably the one of the title - that are far more elaborate than anything George Miller, the director, has attempted before...So if it eventually steers Max into the midst of a tribe of primitive children who regard him as their savior, it can easily be forgiven. This film has showier stunts than its predecessors, and a better sense of humor. It also has Tina Turner, in chain-mail stockings."

That paragraph really gets at the central conflict of Beyond Thunderdome. 

Redemption comes in the end for Max, "the raggedy man" who chooses sacrifice over belonging (as possible payment for his spell as an amoral wanderer in the wasteland). But what about redemption for the movie?  It clearly forsakes its predecessors sense of driving pace, and unromantic view of the human species for a happy ending. 

Is this simply the result of narrative closure, and function of the story arc?  Or is it a flaw that keeps the movie from fully satisfying those who began the journey with Mad Max?

Welcome, to another edition of Thunderdome!

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome finds former policeman and family man Max (Gibson) wandering in a seemingly endless desert, driving a team of camels on his converted automobile...now no more than an old-fashioned wagon. 

A plane dives from the sky and unseats Max from his vehicle.  The plane's pilot, Jedidiah (Bruce Spence), jumps into the driver's seat and rides away, leaving Max behind.

Max survives and heads to Bartertown, a nearby outcropping of "civilization" in the desert.  He hopes to find Jedidiah and re-claim his property, but instead becomes the pawn of Auntie Entity (Tina Turner), Bartertown's benefactor. 

In particular, Entity wants the "King Arab" of the town's energy-producing facility, "Underworld" dead for his repeated attempts to assert authority over her and "embargo" the town's energy. But killing Master (Angelo Rossitto) is harder than it sounds because he is protected by a body guard, the hulking "Blaster."

Auntie strikes a deal with Max to kill Blaster inside the town's arena, a "hall of justice" called "Thunderdome." Max wins the battle, but finds that Blaster suffers from Down Syndrome and possesses "the mind of a child."  Holding on to his code of ethics, Max refuses to kill Blaster, and is -- for "busting a deal"  -- sent into the wilderness on a horse, gulag-style.

In the desert, a tribe of orphan children find Max and worship him as their lost leader, Captain Walker. These "Waiting Ones" believe that Max can lead them home to civilization, to the city, but are in for a disappointment when Max tells them the truth;  that nothing of mankind's previous civilization remains intact. 

When a group of children led by Savannah Nix (Helen Buday) make the trek into the wilderness anyway, Max must rescue them, and, once again, survive the dangers of Bartertown. 

In the months and years following Max's rescue of the children, Savannah and the survivors of "The Waiting Ones" remember men like Max...hoping that they too will return to civilization at last.

"I know you won't break the rules, because there aren't any."

One arena where you can't fault George Miller and George Ogilvie's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is in the creation of an intriguing, visually-distinguished, post-apocalyptic world. 

From the film's first aerial shot (looked to be lensed from low planetary orbit, so you can actually see the curve of the Earth...) to the first reveal of Bartertown (a swooping Louma crane shot...) and beyond, this sequel is vetted in extraordinary and dazzling visual fashion.  

The imagination and ingenuity of the production designer, Graham Walker, is on full-display throughout.  And cinematographer Dean Semler captures all the details -- both droll and dirty -- with aplomb.

What remains special about this Mad Max world is how it effortlessly seems both funny and realistic.  The entrance way to Bartertown, for instance is a crowded tunnel where "The Collector" greets newcomers and assesses their skills, followed by a weapons drop-off point. 

After that pit stop, it's daylight...into pandemonium.  There's the humorously named "Atomic Cafe," a peddler hawking fresh water ("what's a little fall-out?"), the "House of Good Deals," and towering over everything, the imposing, palatial residence of Aunty Entity.

Oh, and there's a little place called Thunderdome, a stadium that has entered the American pop culture vernacular in a permanent way (referenced on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and in other productions.) 

You already know the rules....there aren't any.  Two men enter...one man leaves.  

But Thunderdome is fascinating for two reasons. First, the "why" behind its very existence in Bartertown is compelling: the survivors of this world's nuclear apocalypse realized that killing leads to warring and that warring was "damn near the end of us all."  

So here -- perhaps wisely -- violence is limited to this one, awful place. Beyond it, blood lust has no place in Bartertown.  Allegedly, anyway.

The second scintillating aspect of Thunderdome is the orchestration of Max's fight inside it.  The combatants are strung-up on elastic bands and fight in mid-air, reaching for weapons (such as chainsaws and mallets) at the upper apex of the dome. So Max and his opponent, Blaster, whirl, fly, bounce, dip and spin in battle, and it's pretty exciting stuff.  Not to mention staggeringly original.

This is how Time Magazine critic Richard Schickel described the locale: "Thunderdome is both hall of justice and cultural center for Bartertown, presided over by Aunty Entity (Tina Turner), purring like a tiger and claiming she has created civilization's highest flowering since nuclear devastation. Indeed she has, if an imitation of late 20th century city life--all junk, improvisations and random brutality--is your idea of civilization. Thunderdome brilliantly clarifies that irony. Its high-bounding excesses of action simultaneously satisfy and satirize the passion for heedless viciousness that so profoundly moves the action film's prime audience, urban adolescent males."

In other words, the Thunderdome setting provides both the setting for a fantastic, inventive action sequence and a context for some social commentary on our world in the 1980s; the world in which American Gladiators was later born; a world in which action stars such as Stallone and Schwarzenneger were tops at the box office. 

Late in the Thunderdome sequence, Max is introduced to another compelling element of Bartertown's law: The Wheel. As in, "Bust a Deal, Face the Wheel."    

Here, Max faces random justice in front of a giant spinning wheel that satirizes in shape and form the titular Wheel of Fortune (1983 - present) from the popular TV game show with Pat Sajak and Vanna White. Only here the selections on the wheel are matters of life and death: Gulag, hard labor, acquittal, death, Aunty's Choice, forfeit goods, etc. 

"Justice is only a roll of the dice...a turn of the wheel," stresses Dr. Dealgood, importantly. Once more, I should stress that this legal system makes perfect if perverse sense, given the circumstances.  

The "survivors" in this world didn't make it because they were smart...they survived the apocalypse because of luck. Even Aunty Entity acknowledges this fact...she was nobody until the apocalypse made her somebody. The people of Bartertown believe that fickle fate accounts for their survival and continuance, and the Wheel is a kind of legal expression of that fickle sense of fate or destiny.

In toto, the early scenes in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome -- at Bartertown -- reveal much of value about human nature. Aunty Entity wants complete and total control of the town, and is unwilling to share it with Master in the Underworld. One can certainly understand why: he's capricious and enjoys her public humiliation. 

Still, it's difficult to claim the mantel of civilization in one breath while ordering a hit on "family" the next, as Max points out to Aunty.   

But thematically, there's something important going on here.  As one character states in the film, "no matter where you go; there you are."  Mankind -- no matter his aspirations; no matter his new forms of government -- remains the same breed; the same ambitious animal. Even after a world-war and wholesale destruction of the planet surface, Bartertown is still a savage place.

Everything about Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome's first act is filled with invention: the location, the camera-work, the nature of Aunty's entourage, the social commentary, and even the significance of Max's role as the outsider (the film literally compares him to Eastwood's "man with no name" at the inception of the Thunderdome fight).  

These are the reasons why critics adore the film. And in addition to all these accomplishments, the movie also achieves a difficult balance in terms of the sequel format: Thunderdome spins new and interesting territory out of the franchise world rather than simply recycling and revisiting familiar elements from it.

It's the Story of Us All...

But something goes dramatically wrong in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome's final act.  The movie's intellectual, harsh-minded tone gives way to a sort of Hollywood-ish blockbuster mind-set which stresses easy humor and pat solutions over invention and social commentary. 

Cute kids dressed as native warriors take center stage, and the movie attempts to derive humor from their misunderstanding of pre-apocalypse technology (like phonograph records).   his is the "Ewok Paradigm" that also, to some extent, scuttled Return of the Jedi (1983), though admittedly on a lesser scale.

What's the problem? Well, again, it's all about tone. Suddenly Mad Max is a figure of fun and humor, running into a hallway of armed goons, and then running back in the opposite direction towards camera  (like Han Solo on the Death Star in Star Wars). Or worse, punching a bad guy through a vent grate in a moment timed for broad comedy instead of thrills and intensity.

Suddenly, bad guys are getting decked with pots and pans by crockery-wielding tykes. And a dark, monstrous bully-figure like Ironbar morphs before our eyes into a live-action Wily Coyote, surviving deadly incident after deadly incident unscathed until all sense of reality around the character bleeds away, sacrificed for callow, crowd-pleasing visual jokes (like an upturned middle finger as his last gesture of defiance). 

There are some folks who dislike the latter half of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome simply because of the presence of cute children in the action, and I understand that objection.  Again, looking back to The Road Warrior, there was an absolutely unsentimental and brilliant child character: the Feral Kid.  The movie did not play favorites with him, sentimentalize or romanticize him in any way.  He was simply a wild child who grew up in a terrible world and who befriended Max.

Beyond Thunderdome works hard to earn the presence of these children in this particular chapter.  One child even dies in the film, devoured by a sandstorm in the desert. And I understand why the moviemakers wanted children here in the first place: to represent our future; our tomorrows.

But the children have a whimsical way of speaking that feels tonally out-of-place ("Tomorrow-orrow Land,"), and the movie resorts to squeezing gags out of these children (like learning French, or learning how to drive a car) and it's all just too damn cute.

"Cute" is the last thing that fans of The Road Warrior were seeking in a sequel.

Again, I get it.  It's about redemption. It's about Max -- who lost a child himself -- coming to the defense of other children. In that act (and in his final sacrificial move in battle...), Max finally returns to the human race. I appreciate that arc very much; but wish that the obvious humor and terminal cutesies had been more studiously avoided. The same story could have been vetted in less schmaltzy terms. It's the tone of the thing; not necessarily the story itself that I object to.

And alas, it isn't just the presence of cute children that feels like a bow to Hollywood mainstream entertainment in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome's final act, it is also the very resolution of the drama.  A railway line conveniently runs out of Bartertown so Max and the children can escape by train, and then the film provides a thoroughly conventional car chase-styled action scene, with the train at the center of the action. This feels like a very, very pale retread of the blazing, sustained tanker truck pursuit at the end of The Road Warrior. 

Once more, a point of contrast: The Road Warrior's tanker battle absolutely refused to play favorites. The film's female lead character, played by Farscape's gorgeous Virginia Hey, died ingloriously in that hair-raising, exciting sequence.  There was just no sentimentality. 

But in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, kids survive a similar assault by heroically wielding iron cooking pans against ruthless, amoral soldiers. It just feels...wrong. Would this technique have worked against Humongous?

On one hand, you don't want a sequel (or a sequel to a sequel, in this case) to repeat everything from the previous film, but the final battle of Beyond Thunderdome feels like Road Warrior-lite.  Or more appropriately, The Road Warrior re-fashioned for mass, Hollywood-consumption.

In its last twist -- a return to the destroyed 20th century city -- Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome recovers some from the battle's misstep.  This moment has a valedictory, tragic feel.  

Re-building our civilization must begin, and here we detect the first steps; as well as the romantic, hopeful act of lighting candles to bring the desert warriors back. 

It's a nice, emotional closing touch that suggests an optimistic future,  but yet -- again -- it's hard to deny that the Feral Kid's closing narration (as an old man) in The Road Warrior achieves the same goal, only with words instead of images.

Also -- and I realize some people with quibble with me on this -- is it right that Max brings down Bartertown at all?  I think this is a debatable point.  

As bad as it surely is, Bartertown is still the best thing going in this post-apocalyptic world. Violence is limited to the Thunderdome, and there is law there...as well as commerce.  Order has been carved out of chaos; even if it isn't perfect.

Would it not have been better for Max to somehow bring some checks and balances to the place, so it wasn't simply a tyranny?  (And really, isn't that what Master Blaster offered in Underworld in the first place?)  

Going back to our own antiquity, would we cheer a hero in early human culture who brought down the first civilization, even if it did boast a "draconian" code or sense of justice?  I don't think so.  Even imperfect steps towards civilization can be vital ones.

The destruction of Bartertown in the film has never rung true to me. Who is to say that Savannah Nix and her brood -- living in a burnt-out shell of a building -- aren't going to be forced to navigate issues of law and order, justice and punishment too? Will their answers be better than Auntie Entity's?  More humane? Less pragmatic? The movie never really answers that question in satisfactory fashion; it just uses the symbol of children to suggest innocence and a better tomorrow.

So how do you assess a film with an absolutely brilliant first act and a relatively derivative, by the numbers, Hollywood last act?  Well, "this is the truth of it:"  the movie works more often than not; and succeeds more so if you consider it as the final, closing act of a grand trilogy.  There has to be a wrap-up, and it has to be satisfactory (meaning - happy).  We get that in Beyond Thunderdome, even if we don't necessarily want the closure. 

So in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome audiences get one of the greatest, most imaginative fight scenes in recent decades, and a fitting conclusion to a terrific post-apocalyptic saga.  The downside is that audiences also get cute kids, and Hollywood-styled, crowd-pleasing humor.

The Road Warrior (1982)

I first viewed The Road Warrior on a double bill with Superman III at the Castle Theater in Irvington, New Jersey. I was thirteen or fourteen years-old at the time and saw the movie(s) with my father. 

Alas, my showing of The Road Warrior was interrupted three times by police incursions into the auditorium (the Castle was that kind of theater in the eighties...) but somehow the danger in the theater only added to the aura of danger, anxiety and uncertainty generated by George Miller's landmark, startling post-apocalyptic film.

At that young age, I had rarely experienced an action film as intense or cut-throat as The Road Warrior, but now that I've screened the film a dozen times over the years, I recognize that it wasn't merely the experience of seeing it at the Castle during a drug bust or three; it's the film itself, which remains of the ten great action films of the last thirty years. 

More than that -- and discounting Planet of the Apes -- it's one of the cinema's most effective and brilliantly-shot post-apocalyptic efforts.

The Road Warrior opens with an evocative and tightly-edited black-and-white montage. A voice-over narration accompanies the fleeting but memorable documentary images (stock footage), which depict our twentieth-century "oil culture" as two "mighty warrior tribes" go to war to control the dwindling resource. 

The montage reveals vast war machines at sea and on land, and then endless, stagnating debate among world leaders on how to control the limited reserves. After this debate, the montage reveals, the thundering war machines of technological man "sputtered and stopped." 

Furthermore, world civilization itself "crumbled." Cities exploded in a whirlwind of looting, and man "began to feed on man." Nomadic gangs took over the highways, dominating them and making the roads treacherous, murderous passages. It is here, via stock footage of 1979's Mad Max that we are introduced to the personal story of Max [Mel Gibson], an ex-policeman who lost everything; only to wander the wasteland as a "burned-out" desolate sentinel.

In terms of narrative, the voice-over device and stock-footage montage in unison frame this tale as though it occurred in the distant, murky past. 

In part this is because of the grainy stock footage, which looks to be drawn from the early part of the twentieth century, but the sense of an "old story" also arises from the voice of the narrator, which suggests wisdom and age, among other qualities. 

The war is history to the adult "teller" of the tale; and our civilization itself is pre-history. This remote time frame thus lands the post-apocalyptic "future" of Mad Max into the realm of origin myth, or heroic legend. The teller could be speaking of Achilles and the Trojan War, or perhaps more aptly, the Old West in his discussion of the manner in which a new civilization was founded from the ashes of the old.

The Old West metaphor also works to the film's advantage because in -- some very critical ways -- The Road Warrior is not unlike a Spaghetti Western of the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

Witness these facts: it is filmed in a location that could be the American West (here, the Australian Outback); the camera work is highly fluid (like the work of Sergio Leone); and the production is distinctly, but not alarmingly, low-budget.

Similarly, much like many Italian Westerns, the film also actively sets about to deconstruct or de-mythologize its world, focusing on such horrible human behaviors as rape and murder. To put it politely, The Road Warrior is not a romantic vision of human nature. 

Even the treatment of a child -- the Feral Child -- is realistic rather than romanticized.

After the opening exposition, which plays like the visual equivalent of a dusty history book, Miller's kinetic camera swoops down (apparently from a helicopter) at near-warp speed towards an endless highway. 

The asphalt flies by the camera and immediately the audience feels a sense of momentum and acceleration. Suddenly we're enmeshed in colorful, full-speed chase, as loner Max is pursued by the motorcycle-riding thugs of a warlord called Humongous (also known as "the ayatollah of rock-and-rollah..."). 

From this first moment, the film never lets up, never stops, never really slows down. It is a race from start to finish, a maelstrom of flipping, careening vehicles, high-speed pursuits and bloody confrontations.

The cinema has provided us all manner of "end of the world" scenarios before, from nuclear war (Planet of the Apes) to germ-created vampires (Last Man on Earth), to melting ice caps even (Waterworld), but The Road Warrior today seems to offer the most plausible (or at least relevant) scenario as it explicitly concerns a war over limited resources, in this case oil.

In 1982, America had not yet fought two wars for oil in the Middle East, and so didn't seem quite so prophetic. 

But now? It's seems so indeed, especially with some factions fomenting for yet another American war in that region of the world.

The bulk of The Road Warrior involves Max's interactions with a post-apocalyptic frontier town, a society that has sprung up around a functional oil refinery (perhaps the last...). The people who live there boast resources to squander, and don't want to share it. Instead, they dream wistfully of a paradise by the beach where they can live in peace with their drums of black gold tucked safely away. 

Before long, Max is dealing not only with these inhabitants of the refinery (who feel they have a rightful claim to the oil), but with the occupying, invading army of Humongous. The Warlord, who admonishes the peaceful refinery people to "just walk away," requires the oil to keep his mechanical war machine running. Without it, one realizes, even his loose society of scavengers and marauders would likely fall into total anarchy.

The story of fallen mankind fighting over the scraps of civilization (like "angry ants," as one character notes), is buoyed by Miller's directorial sense of invention and also his understanding of framing and mise-en-scene.

For instance, in the scene in which Max is confronted by an auto-gyro pilot (Bruce Spence), notice how Gibson is almost always positioned in the center of the frame, He deals with snakes and an armed assailant...yet those threats still "orbit" Max, not vice versa. This is important because the framing makes us believe in Max as immovable object -- a tower of strength -- early in the film (witness his handling of the snake...), a notion which is undercut significantly later in The Road Warrior when he is bruised and beaten after one encounter with the scavengers. 

The idea, I suppose, is to open with Max as figure of strength, and then -- as the events of the film overcome him -- figuratively cut off his legs, so that the audience grows more involved with his survival. He starts out as a loner, but by the end of the film, Max needs the others to survive. This is an important element of his growth; of his redemption and return to the human race. The journey is completed in the final film, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985).

The stakes are high in Max's world, and George Miller doesn't shy away from revealing how bad things are there. There is a scene, for instance, in which Max sits on the rim of a mountain eating dog food, and acts as though it is the best thing he's ever tasted.  

Miller also dramatizes a failed escape attempt with horrific results. A man and a woman flee the refinery and are set on by the marauders. The moment, seen through the lens of a telescope, culminates in a double murder. The auto gyro pilot watches this event lasciviously at first, because the female escapee is stripped (we see her breasts...), but his desire turns to horror as she is brutally raped and murdered. '

This is what mankind has come to, and it's only hope is Max, a man whom the screenplay describes as "a parasite." Max is no hero; the people of the refinery are no saints (they resort to duplicity with Max, for one thing...);but both Max and the town people are better than the utter immorality and monstrosity represented by Humongous and his gang. Here -- as in many cases -- it is a choice between the lesser of two evils.

So much of The Road Warrior is unromantic and blunt. Consider, for instance, the beautiful, Amazonian warrior (Virginia Hey). She protects the refinery and is portrayed as heroic and courageous. In most Westerns or genre films, a romance might blossom between this gorgeous, strong character and Max. 

Not so here. 

Instead, she is brutally murdered in the film's final chase scene. She is shot and left to dangle off a truck turret. The message: this is a world that makes no distinction between male and female; between movie "hero" and movie "fodder."

Likewise Humongous's version of Baghdad Bob loses his fingers to a boomerang in one scene, and Miller indelicately cuts to an insert shot of those fingertips flying through the air. Even more tellingly, it was the Feral Kid -- a warrior, himself -- who throws that boomerang. A child! And how do Baghdad Bob's "friends" and associates react when he loses his fingers? They cheer and guffaw. 

In this world, pain is a source of laughter; even if the person hurting is on your side. The message is again that society is gone, and that we -- as viewers -- can't expect decorum from this film if we simultaneously expect it to be "true" to what such a world would look and feel like.

The murder of a dog (or dingo) is depicted slightly less bluntly, but there are other harrowing moments here, when arrows are yanked out of human skin on screen, for instance. And examine Max's demeanor too. In the film, he demonstrates no compassion or human consideration for anyone, including the pilot, until he himself requires help and rescue.  All of this focus on human ugliness makes The Road Warrior a nihilistic action film, but one of remarkable imagery and power. With civilization goes decorum; with decorum goes decency; with decency goes humanity.

The central portion of The Road Warrior involves Humongous's Alamo-like siege on the refinery (and there is a brilliantly-staged, almost De Palma-esque tracking shot featured here as Miller's camera pursues a rabbit hopping madly through the compound as an attack gathers nearby...), yet it is the final third of the film that leaves one breathless and walloped. 

The last act of The Road Warrior is an eighty-mile-an-hour chase scene, a non-stop demolition derby involving a weaving tanker truck, buzzing cars, roaring motorcycles and the swooping auto-gyro. Characters leap from speeding vehicle to speeding vehicle; characters swing chains, fire arrows, and drive for their lives. 

It's a go-for-the-gusto finale that tops everything else in the picture, and to this day still tops most action movie denouements. I should add, it was all executed on a low budget, with real vehicles (no CGI!) and absolutely rousing stunt work. Coupled with Brian May's pulse-pounding soundtrack, the action climax of The Road Warrior is a burst of sustained adrenaline, injected right into the heart.

A superb and clever addition to the post-apocalyptic film pantheon, The Road Warrior is artistically crafted, and the film pauses its relentless drive to the climax only long enough to offer a little homage. In a scene involving a music box and a corpse falling out of a truck cab, Miller's film momentarily pays tribute to a quieter moment in Romero's Night of the Living Dead. 

It does so, I submit, because Miller recognizes Night as a spiritual antecedent. Both films are distinctively unromantic portraits of humanity; both films are about a change (or degradation...) in the social order, and both films are blunt in their portrayals of violence. 

The only significant difference is that Night of the Living Dead is so bleak that it kills Ben (the film's hero), whereas the device of the montage/voice-over leaves room in The Road Warrior for the possibility that mankind -- in a better iteration, hopefully -- will go on to thrive in a new world; one where the violence we see here is but a misty memory; just like that warrior of the wasteland, Max.

The third film completes Max's journey of redemption, but even there, he is not quite ready to return to the human race, to civilization.