Three Dollars
Clip 1: ‘Be elusive but don’t walk far’
3 min 3 sec
Taken from the feature Three Dollars (2005)
Original title classification M – this clip chosen to be PG
Availability of the complete title
Curator’s clip description
Eddie visits the site of a proposed major development to take soil contamination samples. He remembers his childhood sweetheart Amanda (Casey Peterson), whose father is the developer behind this new project. As he works, a crop-dusting helicopter gives him a major scare.
Curator’s notes
The helicopter scene is a direct quote of a very famous scene in an Alfred Hitchcock thriller, North by Northwest, made in 1959, in which Cary Grant is chased along a deserted road by an aeroplane. The two films have very different plots but they do share the idea of a man whose life is spinning out of control because of nothing he can pinpoint. Robert Connolly has said that the film, co-written with the novelist Elliot Perlman, was an attempt to create a character who was a good man, then test him with a series of everyday modern dilemmas in an attempt to break him. ‘We wanted to articulate our frustrations of this point in history in which we’re being asked to turn a blind eye to things we should be more concerned about’. Connolly sees Australia as becoming increasingly polarised. ‘The way a country becomes like that is when responsibility for a broader social agenda is lost in the face of an incredible political climate. (There’s) this whole idea that we should all try to get rich’.
Paul Byrnes, curator
