Backroads
Clip 1: ‘The trouble with you Abos …’
3 min 0 sec
Taken from the short feature Backroads (1977)
Original title classification R – this clip chosen to be M
Availability of the complete title
Please be aware that this clip may contain the names, images and voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who may now be deceased.
This clip contains medium-level coarse language, and medium-level violence.
Curator’s clip description
After a big night of drinking, Jack King (Bill Hunter) steals a car, a 1962 Pontiac Parisienne, with the help of a stranger (Gary Foley), whose own car has been stripped overnight. They take off through deserted streets of a town in western NSW, with no plans and no cash.
Curator’s notes
Noyce gets the film off to an energetic and memorable start, with a scene that turns on a spur of the moment decision. Most of the events in the film happen in this way, as characters act on barely conscious impulses, sometimes with terrible results. The film dispenses with the usual scenes to establish character, or motivation. Noyce wanted to avoid a three-act structure, for something looser and more spontaneous. The film also has noticeably aggressive and racist language in the way Jack talks to the stranger – but it also suggests an instant kinship, a ‘brotherhood of outlaws’.
Paul Byrnes, curator
