Grievous Bodily Harm

Clip 2: No more favours

Taken from the feature Grievous Bodily Harm (1988)

Original title classification M – this clip chosen to be PG

This clip contains low-level violence.

Curator’s clip description

Detective Sergeant Ray Birch (Bruno Lawrence) calls journalist Tom Stewart (Colin Friels) forward at the site of an armed siege. A three-time rapist called Les (Richard Carter) has a woman tied up in a warehouse. Birch offers Stewart the chance to talk to Les, then shoots the criminal with a high-powered rifle. Birch then tells Stewart what to write – that the criminal fired first, and Birch had to kill him to save the girl and the reporter. Stewart is disgusted.

Curator’s notes

The film has a lot of morally ambiguous set-ups, in which the question of corruption is one of degree. Tom is quite happy to steal stolen money, but he draws the line at Birch’s ruthless methods. Ray Birch, an old-fashioned copper, believes he saved the girl’s life and the taxpayer some expense, by despatching a serial rapist.

Paul Byrnes, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

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This clip shows Detective Sergeant Ray Birch (Bruno Lawrence) at an armed siege, where he uses journalist Tom Stewart (Colin Friels) as a foil in order to shoot a rapist called Les (Richard Carter) who is holding a woman hostage. Negotiations have stalled and Birch sends for Stewart, offering him a ‘scoop’ if he talks to Les. However, when Les comes to the warehouse door, Birch shoots him and then fires into the ground. He tells Stewart to write that Les fired the first shot, and reminds him of an earlier scoop obtained through underhand means.

Educational value points

Grievous Bodily Harm has been described as a modern ‘film noir‘ and in keeping with this genre the main protagonists, Stewart and Birch, are morally ambiguous characters. In this clip Birch appears at first to be an honest policeman doing his best to break the siege, but this impression is undermined when he uses Stewart as a ruse to shoot the rapist, Les, in cold blood.

Contrasting light and dark is a feature of film noir, and is often used to signify a character’s moral ambiguity. During the exchange between Stewart and Birch in the warehouse scene the use of low-key lighting often places Stewart’s face in partial shadow, an effect heightened by filming the two men in profile. The final shot reinforces this ambiguity by placing Stewart in the centre right of the frame against a backdrop that is neatly divided into shadow and light.

During the final part of the siege the clip cuts between shots of Les, Stewart, Birch and a nearby train, which in each shot is shown progressively closer to the camera. The changing position of the train may be intended to build tension and to suggest that each party is on a collision course. The soundtrack reinforces this sense, the tempo of the music escalating with the advancing train and increasingly rapid edits.

The clip depicts an incident of police corruption. At the time Grievous Bodily Harm was released in 1988, the New South Wales police force had a reputation for widespread corruption, including the fabrication and planting of evidence. The Royal Commission into the NSW Police Service conducted by Justice James Wood between 1994 and 1997 found that corruption was endemic and systemic within the force.

Colin Friels, who plays Tom Stewart, graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA) in 1976 and has since worked in film, television and theatre. He made his mark in the title role in Malcolm (1986), winning Best Actor in a Lead Role at the 1986 AFI Awards, and won another AFI award for his work in Halifax fp: Hard Corps (1994). Friels has been nominated for two other AFI awards but is best known for his role as Detective Frank Holloway in Water Rats.

The New Zealand actor Bruno Lawrence, who plays the hard-bitten and ruthless Detective Sergeant Birch in Grievous Bodily Harm, appeared in a number of Australian films including Rikky and Pete (1988), The Delinquents (1989) and Spotswood (1992). In the early 1990s he won plaudits for his role as the cynical television executive in the television comedy series Frontline. He returned to New Zealand in 1994, just prior to his death in 1995.

Director Mark Joffe has worked in both film and television, and it was his direction of the fast-paced, taut and well-received television miniseries The Great Bookie Robbery (1986) that led to his selection as director of Grievous Bodily Harm. His other films include Spotswood (1992), Cosi (1996), The Matchmaker (1997) and The Man Who Sued God (2001).