Barry McKenzie Holds His Own
 Watching Barry McKenzie Holds His Own today it's
difficult to believe that as a kid I was allowed to show this
movie at my high school.
The 1974 sequel to The Adventures of
Barry McKenzie is packed with lines like "Our dear little
stunted, slant-eyed, yellow friends" and "Have a crack
at putting the ferret through the furry hoop", which might
have been expected to ring alarm bells with the powers that
be.
But it was the 70s and few of us knew about sexism and racism,
least of all the Education Department. What we did know was that
this film – with its ribald and absurd humour, inventive Aussie
slang, great songs, sex, slapstick, beer, violence, vomiting,
prostitutes and kung-fu fights – not to mention a ridiculous
vampire subplot – was a hoot.
A generation reared on Mavis Bramston and Alf Garnett knew the
difference between a prejudiced diatribe and sharp satire. And who
could doubt that Barry McKenzie Holds His Own was a
"real good cultural show" when the Prime Minister
himself, Gough Whitlam, made a cameo appearance?
As the years have passed Barry McKenzie Holds His Own,
like a fine brew, has only got better, and in my opinion it is one
of the rare instances where the sequel surpasses the
original.
You know you're in for a treat when the opening title tells you
you're about to watch a Reg Grundy Production – no South
Australian Film Corporation guidelines here. Then a grandiose
operatic swoop through the clouds cuts to a plate of live frogs
being served on a French airplane spiralling out of control
because the pilot is shagging the air hostess.
The whole tone is sillier than the first movie. Humphries has
thrown the switch to the absurd and infantile and (perversely)
honed a great political satire. And it's really funny! Where The
Adventures of Barry McKenzie was faithful to the comic strip
and had its feet planted in realism, Holds His Own exists
in a parallel universe where anything can happen as it mocks the
media landscapes of the time, from Hammer Horror and Kung Fu
movies, to Cold War Spy thrillers, to boosterish government
tourism documentaries.
The plot? Well Edna Everage, on tour in Paris with her nephew
Barry, is mistaken for the Queen by two vampires who kidnap her to
help lift the ailing Transylvanian Tourist Industry, located in a
corrupt Eastern Bloc republic.
Barry, his mates, their women and the governments of Australia
and Britain must rescue Edna from the clutches of "the
illustrious socialist leader" Count von Plasma before he
discovers Edna's true identity as an Australian housewife.
On the way we encounter a clerical seminar on 'Christ and the
Orgasm', Barry masquerading as an Arab to get into England as an
illegal, a spectral encounter with Barry's convict ancestor in a
gaol, an immigration game show, a reprise of Humphries’ much
spewed upon Jewish psychiatrist from the first film, and Barry's
clumsy attempts to lose his virginity.
Foster's lager has transubstantiated from the obsessive
beverage of the first film into a magical potion rivalling
Popeye's spinach, and Plasma is eventually seen off with a
cunningly improvised cross of tinnies - the mighty Fosterix!
Rarely has an Australian film enjoyed itself with such sublime
nonsense.
It's fun to see well-known personalities as they were then,
doing the 70s rather than remembering it. Edna Everage, while
still a housewife on a package tour, has assumed greater plot
significance and hints at the purple-headed monster waiting to
conquer Britain. Barry Crocker (who gets camper by the year)
reprises his portrayal of the beer-swilling innocent abroad, but
also gets to play Barry's twin brother, with-it wowser clergyman,
the Very-Reverend Kevin McKenzie.
The director is a pre-Hollywood Bruce Beresford, slumming it in
his Grundy period. There's a young, hirsute Clive James playing
Paddy, a perpetually drunk London-based Australian film critic,
apparently based on Paddy McGuinness but doing a fair
approximation of the younger Clive James. There's Skippy's dad Ed
Devereaux, resplendent in shorts and long socks as the Australian
ambassador, Sir Alec.
My favourite is Col ‘the Frog’ Lucas, a lefty/arty type
living in self-imposed exile in Paris who has gone native (he
carries a French loaf, wears spats and has the lingo down pat –
“Too flambé right!”) and who moonlights as a pimp and
communist spy. Some say he's a parody of Alistair Kershaw but I
reckon he's Frank Hardy, who forsook Australia for gay Paris and
the Soviet Bloc after the Power Without Glory defamation trial.
With the spirit of the Whitlam era being knackered by the
reverential nostalgia of aging boomers, it's great that this
cheeky piss-take of the 'Australian Renaissance' survives,
preserved for eternity in amber fluid. In a perverse way the movie
shows Australians at their best.
This is partly because of the film's mix of larrikinism, humour
and pommy bashing, but mainly because Bazza and his entourage have
a healthy libertine disdain for authority, pomposity and cant.
Tinnies are hurled with democratic gusto at petty bureaucrats,
snobs, frauds and especially smug trendies.
Make no mistake, Holds His Own is gross, rude and
offensive – a passing parade of bodily fluids, excreta and base
human drives. But in a fine tradition that goes back to the
mediaeval carnival, the film's ribald, vulgar antics are
subversive, turning upside down the stitched-up hierarchies of a
string of condescending authority figures: clergymen, a
psychiatrist, British police, an Eastern Block potentate,
immigration officials, even a liberated feminist. Vulgarity is a
powerful, levelling weapon, as Aristophanes, Shakespeare and The
Bulletin bards well knew.
On the lookout for some colonials to send on a mission over the
Iron Curtain to rescue Edna Everage, Sir Nigel of the "pommy
foreign orifice" asks for "some young, intelligent,
sober Australians" before modifying his request to "some
young Australians". "I think you'll find plenty of the
old ANZAC spirit," replies Ed Devereaux.
Sir Nigel gets it by the skin full, as Bazza and the Boys
drunkenly rampage through an upper class English party singing:
"I hope every la-de-da pom like you gets the trots when he
swallows a plumb / Go dip your left eye in hot cocky shit and
stick your head up a dead bear's bum!" McKenzies' Marauders
are C.W. Bean's levelling larrikin ANZACs, updated with a
government grant and an Airways bag.
Here then is perhaps the greatest Australian movie ever made
... and one you're unlikely to ever see. While The Adventures
of Barry McKenzie has had a few rare appearances, its sequel
has never been shown on TV, is not available on video and never
gets a guernsey on the pretentious art/retro cinema circuit. We
found our copy in London.
Why has the film disappeared? I think it's less that the
Australian sense of humour has changed (it's always a crowd
pleaser when we show it) than that some of the people who made it
are no longer amused. Having grown old and respectable, a young
iconoclast like director Bruce Beresford is probably rather
embarrassed by the whole thing, preferring to drive Miss Daisy
into the American heartland than be remembered for a Reg Grundy
Production about ocker piss-heads pub crawling around Europe. In
fact, Beresford recently confessed he was unable to get work after
making the film, and feared his directing career had come to an
end.
Maybe the worthies that suck limpet-like on the Australian film
industry had "gone all sophisticated" (like McKenzie in
Europe) and decided Australians needed a correcting diet of
costume dramas like My Brilliant Career and Picnic at
Hanging Rock.
Lift that low brow, but stay around the middle!
I reckon that Beresford's film had gone too far – biting the
hand that fed it, announcing Australia's cultural revolution to be
a sham. The emperor was not only naked, but was holding his own
with too obvious satisfaction.
The middle-aged Max Harris, who took his cosmopolitanism very
seriously, attacked the Bazza films for revering the ockerism that
his mates had fought a war to destroy. The producer of Adventures,
a cocky young Phillip Adams, retorted that Harris may have once
been an Angry Penguin but had turned into a muddle-headed wombat.
The whole ocker thing was a joke, Joyce, but the cultural
commissars had stopped laughing.
Where the first Barry McKenzie movie aims its satire at the
boorish post-war suburban males, Holds His Own goes after
the smug new educated middle class that was taking on airs and
graces in the wake of the “Australian Cultural Renaissance”
ignited by the patronage of Gorton and Whitlam.
Everyone is on the 'cultural' bandwagon, getting their share of
the take. "The government's handing out piles of moolah for
any bastard who reckons he can paint pictures, write pomes or make
filums," Bazza tells drunken film critic Paddy.
In the 1970s trendies bearing bottles of Chianti and a fondue
set made shrill claims about Australia's new-found sophistication.
For Humphries the gentlemen doth protest too much. In Holds His
Own, cosmopolitanism happens in "the contemporary
Australian-Spanish style" and European culture is to be found
at the Munich beer festival.
Humphries had seen the 1950s and was smart enough to realise
that you can't change the country of Robert Askin and Rex Connor
overnight, just because a blow-in in a safari suit whacks 'Blue
Poles' over the fibro. The film is introduced by the Minister for
Culture, Senator Doug Manton (a proto Sir Les Paterson), with a
model of the Opera House in front of him, a huge Foster's ad
behind him and the buzz of blowflies just audible in the
background. Doug boasts about the wave of 'artistic endeavour'
sweeping out of Australia to conquer the world while leafing
through his copy of Venomous Toads of Australia. “The filum
you're about to see," he puffs, "makes me proud to be an
Australian.”
The much-vaunted cultural renaissance is a con being spruiked
by the same old Aussie blokes in shorts and long socks who always
run this place, personified in the film by Ed Devereaux's
knockabout Australian Ambassador who confesses: "I won't say
we don't pull a few swifties to pull the tourists with all that
garbage about that flamin' joke of an Opera House”.
It's still business as usual for the boys from the Rum Corps
who've simply rote-learned the latest government guidelines and
buzz words, mispronouncing terms like “pitcher”, “culchar”
and that old favourite “the yartz” – sounding much like the
boofy blokes on the SOCOG team today when they go on about “multiculturalism”
and “environmental impact statements”.
But it's not just unsophisticated politicians and cynical
bureaucrats who are in Humphries’ sights. Every crank idea and
unthinking trendy cause of the 70s cops a spray of the
always-foaming Foster’s. As Bazza puts it in ‘The Ratbag Song’:
“A ratbag is a sheila or a bloke / Who's kind of funny, but who
never sees the joke.”
We know we’re taking no prisoners when Bazza bumps into
Rhonda Cuthbert-Jones, the black, well-spoken, feminist editor of Jet
Set, ‘the first magazine with balls’. Rhonda asks Edna
Everage if she's ever balled a chick, and Edna replies with a
crooked smile that “I may be old fashioned, young lady, but
lesbianism has always left a nasty taste in my mouth”.
Humphries thinks little has changed in the suburban backblocks.
Despite the best efforts of liberal Christianity, cultural
re-education, the Australian Film Commission or feminism, it seems
most Aussie blokes are xenophobic homophobes who just want to get
pissed and laid.
And what of the colourful racist invective thrown around with
such redneck abandon? Watching today, the racist stereotypes stick
out like dog's balls. At a time when Australia was busily
apologising for seventy years of the just ended White Australia
policy Barry McKenzie Holds His Own shows a bunch of white
blokes terribly anxious about other races.
Despite having come from a country in the throes of a massive
immigration program and a government pledged to land rights and a
racial discrimination act, Bazza and his mates don't care much for
“abos”, “heathen chinee”, “yellerens”, “ikey-mo type
bastards”, Pakistanis, “frogs”, “wogs” and “dagoes”.
Given Australia's ritual outbreak of immigration hysteria and the
rise of One Nation, was Humphries too far off the mark in
suggesting that decades of racism could not be eliminated
overnight by government fiat?
Given that this is a Humphries film the Left does not come off
well. Bazza’s ‘Pommy Bastards’ T-Shirt of the first film is
now replaced with one emblazoned ‘Commie Bastards’! The
communist leaders of Eastern Europe are vampires sucking their
countries dry (literally) and lording it over their people like
decadent Persian Satraps. He was right there. Humphries thinks the
Australian Left are blind to the realities of the Communist world.
Sir Nigel grumbles about the ridiculous detente between the
Australian government and the Soviet Bloc, and it’s clear the
Australian ambassador and Humphries share this view.
To infiltrate Count Von Plasma's Mountain fastness and rescue
imprisoned Edna Everage, Bazza’s motley crew masquerade as the
Bondi Organisation for Radical Education (BORE), as the only
people to get into the Eastern Bloc from Australia are the ones
who “think the sun shines out of Stalin's arsehole”.
After saving Barry from a communist vampire, a repentant
Comrade Lucas declares: “If you see any of those long-haired
students or commie trade union types you tell ’em from Col the
Frog that Oz is the greatest little country on earth.” The
film's climax is a battle between a Chinese martial arts chef (a
gift from Count Plasma’s ‘friends in Peking’) and Bazza’s
band. As a tour guide boasts about the superlative fighting
machine that is Socialist man,
Bazza prevails by blinding the Chinese chef with a well-aimed
spray of Foster’s.
But Gough is OK, Barry telling his auntie: “I reckon the PM
is that smart he could sell soap to the pommies.” Just to show
what a good sport he is, Whitlam, the Pericles at the centre of
all this democratic patronage, appears at the film’s end to
welcome back the Australian heroes and regally dame Edna Everage,
now set on her trajectory to housewife superstar.
I reckon Whitlam knew that a renaissance that didn't laugh at
the Medicis wasn’t worth having. Quizzed by Mike Willessee as to
why the PM deigned to appear in Barry McKenzie Holds His Own,
Gough deadpanned: “Hasn't everybody held his own? I certainly
have.”
Smart indeed!
© Tony Moore
|
