Roadgames

Hitchcock aficionado and independent film-maker Franklin and his screenwriter Everett De Roche transposed Rear Window to the interior of a truck cabin and mixed in quite a bit of Duel in this story of a truck driver taking a load of meat across the Nullarbor Plain from Melbourne to Perth.

Made with American money off the back of Franklin's financially successful Hitchcockian cheapie, Patrick (1978) despite traversing quite a slice of the Australian continent it does its market-conscious best to be generically anonymous or when it does signal its origins, does so in an exaggerated way (Keach's dog is a supposed dingo). Having Stacy Keach (in a role originally conceived for Sean Connery) and Jamie Lee Curtis, at the outset of her career, of course keeps the pitch solidly Stateside, a strategy which earned the ire of local critics. This aside, Franklin is Franklin and does not have his master's knack for straight-faced irony or flair for artifice. His attempts at the tongue-in-cheek end up being more quasi-comedic and undermining the fairly solid thriller aspect of the film to no gain, whilst the artifice (note particularly the unchanging cloud pattern outside the cabin window) sits ill with Vincent Monton's photography of the unfolding landscape. How damaging this is depends upon your taste and Hitchcock fans and collectors of the offbeat may well find it appealing whilst some credit must go to Franklin for attempting to inject some solid genre film-making into an industry which by that stage had exhausted the costume dramas that had been its mainstay throughout the 1970s.

FYI: Leading Australian stuntman of the day, Grant Page plays the villain and, fittingly, also organised the stunts.

 

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