George Miller’s Mad Max is a B-movie pushing the limits of its potential. You can sense what the filmmakers were trying for—a gritty-cartoonish road rage epic—and you can almost picture them counting the change in their pockets, trying to figure out how they could translate the visions in their heads into a workable film. The movie wants to be more than it can be, so it ends up looking a bit strained in some places, although much of it is undeniably, viscerally effective, especially when Miller and cinematographer David Eggby (Pitch Black) get their cameras right in the middle of the automotive mayhem, ripping up the straight-line asphalt highways cutting through the Australian outback.

First released in 1979, Mad Max introduced the world to a then unknown actor named Mel Gibson. He looks incredibly youthful in this film; smooth-faced and bright-eyed, he was only 21 during principal photography. Gibson has matured as an actor since this first outing (and gone through more than his share of career ups and downs and self-inflicted negative publicity), but even in this early work he displays the kind of robust masculinity mixed with feverish emotion that worked so well for him in American blockbusters like Lethal Weapon (1987) and its sequels and Braveheart (1995). He plays the title character Max, a highway patrolman in the near future (“a few years from now” a title card informs us) in which civilization still exists, but has begun to deteriorate for unexplained reasons, and the highways have become overrun with vicious gangs.

Early on, Max is involved in a high-speed pursuit that results in the death of man known as Nightrider (Vincent Neil). Nightrider is a member of a motorcycle gang led by the flamboyant Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who isn’t too happy with his friend’s demise. So, the gang takes it upon itself to track down Max and the rest of his police force to prove just how unhappy they are. After they succeed in burning Max’s partner, Goose (Steve Bisley), beyond recognition, Max decides to take some early retirement and go on vacation with his wife, Jessie (TV actress Joanne Samuel), and their 2-year old son. Max admits he’s scared, and he just wants to protect his family from all the insanity. But, part of the movie’s effectiveness is the way it conveys the scary idea that, no matter how hard he tries, Max simply cannot escape the insanity. With the entire world apparently on the cusp of complete collapse, no place is safe.

Thus, the gang tracks Max and Jessie down, and, after a narrow escape, they make it to a relative’s house. But, even there in the quiet countryside, they are not safe. When all is said and done, Max has become “Mad Max,” and he is out for revenge. From there, the movie turns into standard revenge fare, with Max avenging the damage done to his family by knocking off the leather-clad gang members one by one. The movie should be given credit for developing a plausible and sometimes tender relationship between Max and Jessie because, without that, Max’s vengeance, which takes up the last third of the film, would have no underlying emotional currents to prop up the violence.

The one twist Miller and co-screenwriter James McCausland (an American-born financial journalist) give us is that Max’s vengeful wrath begins to border on the psychotic (the word mad in the title is not meant to imply only anger). His actions slowly blur the boundaries between the traditional upstanding hero he was at the beginning of the movie and the relentless vigilante he becomes in the end. Mad Max becomes more complicated than it seems at first because it undercuts Max’s revenge, revealing it to be a hollow exercise that kills his enemies and provides cathartic excitement for the audience, but ultimately leaves him adrift and alone, “a shell of a man” as he is described in the superior sequel, 1981’s Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior). One of the final shots of the film shows him driving down the highway, staring blankly ahead, which cements the idea that all this retribution really didn’t mean much in the end.

Of course, what Mad Max is best known for is its clever chase scenes and thrilling stunts. First-time director George Miller, who went on to helm all the subsequent Mad Max sequels, as well as such disparate films as the moving medical drama Lorenzo’s Oil (1993) and the wonderful fantasy Babe: Pig in the City (1998), puts you right in the middle of the action sequences, squeezing every bit out of the tiny budget for consistently impressive effects. The scale of Mad Max is understandably limited, especially in comparison to the vastness of its sequels, but it generates a rumbling kind of thrill, the kind that can only be generated by real stuntmen doing what they do best, not camera tricks and postproduction special effects.

Copyright © 2020 James Kendrick

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