Bad Blood

Just over 40 years ago a madman turned on his neighbours, attacking and killing in a frenzy of resentment at their alleged hostility, creating a reign of terror in the community. He was finally subdued and the rule of law made effective again - but only after a massive force had been organised, combining representatives of several armed forces.

Stanley Graham at Koiterangi in 1941? Yes - but perhaps more than that.

It could equally be true of events in Europe in 1939 when Adolf Hitler, paranoiac and megalomaniac, went berserk. That isn't to say the parallel is clearly drawn in Bad Blood, but the distant gunfire of the battleground is a muted accompaniment to Stan Graham's West Coast rampage. And so it should be. For the twelve days of the Koiterangi manhunt in October 1941 New Zealanders were far more preoccupied with one of their own small townships than with the nations at war across the world. Pearl Harbour was still two months away. New Zealand was not yet under direct threat. The futile campaigns in Greece and Crete were over, the endless tidal flow of Western Desert warfare was between movements, the German drive into Russia faced the chilling prospect of winter. All the news was bleak, but it had that curious remoteness born of our isolation.

And then, at Koiterangi, Stan Graham shot four policemen. Tragedy in our midst briefly shut out the larger tragedy; but, as the reading of a letter from a dead soldier reminds us in Bad Blood, that mass killing was no less sudden, violent and meaningless.

Bad Blood sketches in its setting swiftly and economically. Life on the West Coast then was earthy and primitive. Its small communities had the sort of fellowship in hard labour and shared pleasure that comes with farming in tough conditions. The outsider has no place, is given short shrift. Bad Blood establishes Graham as just such an eccentric, his attitude feeding on the reaction it causes. As the Home Guard drills and the women pack food parcels Stan and his wife Dorothy seethe with bottled up anger at their supposed exclusion. Swirling mist and steady rain suggest a depressing environment, although the camera transforms it into a place of beauty - which merely enhances the abrupt explosion into massacre.

Stan has a gun fetish. His house is an arsenal. When the local policeman, Ted Best, calls to impound his .303 under a wartime regulation Stan sees it as persecution by the authorities. His wife, as dangerously unstable as he is and always ready to goad him on, buys a replacement. Their cattle are drying, their milk is rejected, the bank is pressing for the repayment of an overdraft. The Grahams see themselves as surrounded by enemies deliberately harassing them. When a posse comes from Hokitika to take away his new gun Stan Graham snaps altogether. The irrational killings begin.

One of the chief virtues of Bad Blood is its concentration on the faces of Stan and Dorothy Graham. Carol Burns in particular gives a vivid portrayal of stress and consequent mental disturbance. Burning eyes, tight mouth, shrill voice, tense body - here is a woman consumed by rage and frustration: a sort of back blocks Lady Macbeth, urging her man to stand up for his rights. Jack Thompson is no less impressive, never losing sympathy, perfectly expressing the anguish of a man possessed by devils he can't control - devils that reduce him to a pitiable wreck. In close up, we can see how he is suffering. When he is wounded and hunted, we can see how close he has come to being a wild animal.

BAD BLOOD has much in its favour - not least the way it shows the rough and ready community spirit of a place like Koiterangi: its village hall dances, men here, women there in traditional segregation - tea and sandwiches and washing up out the back - a solitary child happily imitating the steps - muttered conversations and head nodding among the farmers - shared recipes or beauty hints on the distaff side. These are the things that give Bad Blood a distinctive New Zealand flavour - and of course the setting itself. Gary Hansen's photography makes the very most of bush, valley, river and mountain - a marvellously serene natural backdrop for a lurid human tragedy.

The New Zealand cast are thoroughly at home with the laconic, colloquial script and there are some nice touches of humour - as when the Home Guard heed the cry of 'Tea's up:' rather than the official order to dismiss. Even when the tension is at its height, in the sequence where Graham comes back to his house at night and shoots up its sentries, the script allows a measure of laughter with the panic, fear and confusion. In this low-key approach, nicely contrasted with the mounting hysteria of Stan and Dorothy Graham, lies much of the film's effectiveness.

Mike Newell has handled Bad Blood with commonsense and sensitivity. Any other treatment might have been disastrous, given the nature of the story and the lingering feeling in the district that it would be best forgotten. When, at the end, the people of Koiterangi burn the Graham's house to the ground it is not so much from vindictiveness as from a primal instinct: fire will cleanse and purify. The final shot, of Mrs Best gazing silently at the smoking wreckage, then turning and walking calmly away into the distance, does not convey her satisfaction at justice being complete. It seemed to me to be sorrow for the dead - whoever they were and whatever they had done.

- Peter Harcourt, Sequence, November 1982.

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