Stone (1974)

When several members of the GraveDiggers outlaw motorcycle club are murdered, Sydney detective Stone (Ken Shorter) is sent to investigate. Led by the Undertaker (Sandy Harbutt), a Vietnam war veteran, the GraveDiggers allow Stone to pose as a gang member. Leaving behind society girlfriend Amanda (Helen Morse), Stone begins to identify with the Undertaker and his comrades Hooks (Roger Ward), Toad (Hugh Keays-Byrne), Dr Death (Vincent Gil), Captain Midnight (Bindi Williams), Septic (Dewey Hungerford) and Vanessa (Rebecca Gilling), the Undertaker’s girlfriend. Amid violent confrontations with the Black Hawks, a rival gang the GraveDiggers hold responsible, Stone uncovers a political conspiracy behind the killings. When the truth is revealed, Stone must choose between his job and his loyalty to the GraveDiggers.

Stone is the first genuine Australian cult film and, on a cost-to-profit equation, it also ranks as one of the most commercially successful Australian productions of the 1970s. Stone was released at the tail end of the American biker movie boom that had begun with The Wild Angels (1966) and soared in the wake of Easy Rider (1969). The popularity of biker movies may have been in worldwide decline by 1974 but Stone was an exception in Australia. An instant box-office smash, it connected powerfully with audiences as the first true depiction of life among Australian ‘bikies’, and not American ‘bikers’.

More than three decades later, Stone commands a cult following like no other Australian film. In December 1998, 35,000 motorcycle riders (the largest such gathering ever in Australia) rode down the F3 freeway to recreate the film’s famous funeral ride, shot on the same road 25 years previously. The highly respected Vietnam Veterans’ Motorcycle Club has officially licensed the GraveDiggers skull and digger’s hat logo designed by Sandy Harbutt and the influential Australian motorcycle magazine Live to Ride calls it ‘the best biker film ever produced’. That particular endorsement helps explain the film’s enduring success and cultural impact. There is probably no other Australian film that has connected as directly with a working class audience as Stone.

When the Undertaker lets Stone join the GraveDiggers and warns him that he doesn’t ‘want to hear any bullshit’, he is articulating the philosophy adopted by Sandy Harbutt and his team during production. ‘The film grew with what we put into the bikie culture because we became part of it, and also with what they were reciprocating and putting back’, says Harbutt. When Harbutt called for extras to ride in the funeral scene, 400 bikies, many of them Hells Angels, turned up. ‘It was like watching 400 method actors’, says Harbutt. The Hells Angels also took part in the fight scene between the GraveDiggers and the Black Hawks (see clip two). For their day’s work executive producer David Hannay remembers paying them ‘with dope and 36 dozen beers, which they drank in 1 hour’.

Such close contact between the filmmakers and the culture being represented made Stone the genuine Australian article for bike enthusiasts. It also appealed to a broader audience with its authentic depiction of a scarily attractive subculture and direct commentary on the social and cultural divides in early 1970s Australia. An actor best known for his role in the TV crime series The Long Arm (1971), Harbutt had an interest in motorcycles and was inspired to write Stone (with Michael Robinson) after meeting outlaw bikies at the infamous Forth and Clyde hotel in Balmain. ‘I just wanted to understand why they were really on the radical edge of a radical society’, says Harbutt.

Timing worked in Harbutt’s favour. The recently established government funding agency, the Australian Film Development Corporation, had shown a willingness to back a broad range of projects. It provided the entire budget for The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) – making a huge profit in the process – and was prepared to let Harbutt and Hannay run their own show. Harbutt says, ‘I was given a carte blanche situation because there weren’t too many people who were able to control, or wanted even to control, what I was doing’.

Stone is about rebellion, about the clash between ‘straight’ society and those who reject it. The undercover cop is simultaneously repelled by and attracted to the brazenly anti-authoritarian ethos of the GraveDiggers. Toad, the Undertaker, Captain Midnight, Dr Death and the rest of the crew hold ‘normal’ society in contempt and have set up an alternative based on fierce loyalty and violent retribution against anyone who offends them. The Undertaker’s girlfriend, Vanessa, has walked away from a successful modelling career to join her new ‘family’. On the flip side, Stone’s upmarket girlfriend, Amanda, played by Helen Morse in one of her very few film roles, represents the mainstream that fears and loathes the GraveDiggers. She calls them ‘those mutants’, and Stone’s boss, Hannigan, addresses them as ‘you animals’.

Stone was made in the communal spirit depicted by the GraveDiggers. Vincent Gil worked with the camera crew while not acting, and Hugh Keays-Byrne dug the grave in which the murdered Godown is buried in the beautifully filmed sequence at Gore Hill cemetery. Helen Morse was also in charge of standby wardrobe. ‘Our job was finding out which floor they’d been discarded on’, she recalls.

Stone premiered at the Forum Cinema in Sydney in front of guests including members of the Lone Wolf and Hells Angels clubs, and federal Minister for the Media, Senator Douglas McClelland. It was a hit despite mostly negative reviews and hysterical headlines including ‘Australian Film Industry Crashes With Bike Gang Epic’ (The National Times) and ‘Stone the Crows, Mate!, Aussie Movie Proves a Real Stinker’ (Sydney Daily Telegraph). The film proved critic-proof and was still being revived in drive-ins and cinemas well into the 1980s. After getting noticed in Stone, actors Roger Ward, Vincent Gil and Hugh Keays-Byrne were given prominent roles in George Miller’s motorcycle gang-related film Mad Max (1979).

Sandy Harbutt and Stone had a difficult relationship with the AFC, the much larger funding and marketing body that replaced the AFDC in 1975. Disputes over the handling of international sales led to Harbutt buying sole rights to the film in 1980. Harbutt and David Hannay then took Stone to the Cannes film festival market and notched up highly profitable deals for territories including Greece, Germany and Japan. Harbutt refused to sell Stone to the US on the grounds that the actors would have been dubbed with American voices, the fate of the performers in Mad Max (1979). In 1986, Stone was released on home video in a much shorter director’s cut. Harbutt had never seen the film in continuous projection prior to its world premiere (he viewed it on separate reels during editing) and re-cut it from an overlong 126 minutes to a much more effective 98 minutes.

Stone contains many scenes that are still much talked about, including the world record 30-metre plunge by stuntman Peter Armstrong and his motorcycle into the ocean from the Maroubra cliffs. But it is the final scene in Stone that no one forgets. In the documentary Not Quite Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino says, ‘it has maybe the most authentic, realistic ending of a biker movie in the history of film’. An astonishing scene dramatically, it also proves Harbutt’s total commitment to speaking the truth about outlaw bikie culture.

Stone is a true rebel movie that refuses to die. Although Sandy Harbutt (who also penned the thumping theme song, ‘Cosmic Flash’) has not made another feature, his place in Australian film history is assured by this remarkable, indestructible movie.

Stone is the subject of a 1999 documentary Stone Forever, which I produced and directed.

Stone was released in Australian cinemas on 28 June 1974. Duration of the original release was 126 minutes.