High summit of cinema?
More than a decade after the controversial film’s release, Bob Ellis considers whether Geoffrey Wright’s Romper Stomper, starring Russell Crowe, has stood the test of time.
It was nine years before Tampa, four years before Hanson, but there it was, ugly, prophetic, violent, Romper Stomper. ‘This is not your country’. A frankly Hitlerist gang of tattooed thugs going after Asians with baseball bats, bricks and knives in Footscray alleys, defending Australia’s racial and cultural purity. ‘Won’t let what happened to the Abos happen to us,’ says Hando, the headshaven pack leader, urging his eager swarm of war-painted dysfunctionals on, despising pasta as ‘wog food’ and smashing up Japanese cars, pushing back the yellow hordes with Howardite gravitas, we will decide who comes here, and tribal pride. He may lose this war against the unceasing invader, but he will give it his best shot. Russell Crowe in the role has the moral force of Brando, with the crisp, succinct charisma common to all great warrior-leaders.
Undertones of the classics
Homer comes to mind, and Clockwork Orange and Mad Max and Pure Shit and even Downfall, for anyone watching this epic unravelling of a big dream. As Bogart and Cagney and Jimmy Blacksmith showed, we always identify with the character who’s front and centre whatever his beliefs or his genocidal deeds. So good is Crowe and his co-stars – and the urban warfare choreography of the auteur, Geoffrey Wright – the story by its end seems almost Arthurian.
The Guinevere in this case is Gabe (Jackie McKenzie), an unstable, epileptic, rich bohemian drop-out lately escaped from years of tender incest with her filmmaker-artist father Martin (Alex Scott) and smitten by Crowe’s Hando (whom she rapidly beds and readily takes from behind) at first unwillingly, and then avidly, joining in the brutal headkicking of impertinent Vietnamese.
The Lancelot figure is Davey (Daniel Pollock), at first meekly worshipful of Hando, his comrade, guru and male-bonded friend, then in love with Gabe and resentful of him; and then, when she breezily comes to his bed, in open heretical mutiny, wanting him dead.
In this role, bruised and simmering, with a James Dean thwarted longing in his eyes, Pollock gives a hint of the great career he never had after falling, drugged, in front of a train and dying at the tender age of 23.
Not that it matters, but the copulation scenes are as raw and fine as the face bashing and besieged factory ones, the burning and pillaging that wordlessly, brutally swarm over the movie. This is sex as it is remembered, straightforward, eager, innocent, deadly, and Jackie McKenzie – giving her all, I suppose – transfigures into great acting what else might seem a mess of gasping, heaving and rolling about.
Hard to find a flaw, at even this distance, in Romper Stomper. Better than Clockwork Orange and all the Mad Maxes, it gives us the narrative spontaneity of how quickly one thing leads to another and tragedy unfolds for those daft enough to embark, in modern times, on a great adventure.
Cast and crew
Crowe’s next role, a mild-mannered teenage homosexual with an understanding dad in The Sum of Us, showed, after this one, in which he felt like the 35-year-old Richard Burton, how great his range was, his ability to inhale a role and make it somehow entirely new. He gave, I told him once, black-and-white performances in colour films, and he said, ‘I think I know what you mean.’ He remains unsurpassed in English-speaking cinema as the male who gave us the greatest variety of emotional impact since the coming of sound.
For Geoffrey Wright, though, sadly, this perfect matching of director to subject was never repeated. His Metal Skin was overwrought, his Macbeth pretentious rubbish. But he gave us this, his lone high summit of cinema, the best Australian film of its kind, and, worldwide, among the greatest.
Bob Ellis is a journalist, writer and director who has worked on numerous film and television projects including the 1978 film Newsfront as well as writing and directing The Nostradamus Kid.
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