Goodbye Pork Pie

Sex, drugs, crime, baiting authority, hedonism - even (great heavens!) wilful destruction of property. The blood of my puritan forefathers froze in my veins to see such disgracefully amoral behaviour. But at the same time the cockles of my heart were warmed by the sheer brilliance that had gone into creating such a piece of entertainment.

Goodbye Pork Pie is a cheerfully exuberant thumb to the nose at much of our dreary conventional way of life. From the moment 'Gerry Austin' (Kelly Johnson) acquires a dropped pocket-book in Kaitaia until the fade-out a thousand miles later in Invercargill Goodbye Pork Pie travels as a good movie should - with pace, tension, humour, tenderness, mystery and a sharp appreciation of its audience. The film has been made for people over 15 (in fact it has an R13 certificate) and under 35. Those twenty years represent the difference between my generation (35 in 1958) and today's new breed of cinemagoers. I am fortunate to have a family that includes two members of that new breed (18 and 14) with whom I can compare my own reactions.

If I tut-tutted, as I'm sure most of my contemporaries did, at the sheer effrontery of the characters played by Kelly Johnson and Tony Barry, their anti-social antics were a source of pure delight to the young. They accepted without question the casual mating of the self-declared 'virgin' and the smart-alec 'buck', scoring only to win a two-dollar bet. They found nothing alarming in the idea that the runaways should get petrol by tricking or confusing the service-station attendants. They laughed uproariously at each new ingenious ploy to outwit the police and the traffic officers - to say nothing of the bunglers (as portrayed) in the Armed Offenders Squad. This was Abbott and Costello in Bonnie and Clyde Meet the Wizard of Oz - a Technicolor fantasy of cops and robbers, a Tin Man, a Straw Man, a nubile Dorothy, even (finally) an eccentric Cowardly lion (John Bach). There was actually a Wizard too - he whose Emerald City is in Christchurch's Cathedral Square.

Not that Goodbye Pork Pie is all just laughs and shrugs and wish fulfilment. It has moments of brooding introspection, scenes that reveal a glimpse of the melancholy that surrounds the whole gleeful escapade. Pursued by a traffic officer the fugitives in their yellow Mini dart along a side road - and suddenly enter an eerie graveyard of derelict vehicles, what seems like acres of rotting testimony to the futility of the consumer economy. As one character surveys the decaying landscape his partner in crime winks and nudges him into paying up the bet he's won by 'deflowering' their travelling companion. It's an image of the cynicism and insouciance that seems to pervade society. Later, of course, the same character will show that he cares by stopping and going back to check that a crashed traffic officer is unhurt. You see, our two heroes (or, if you like, anti-heroes) are fleeing the clutches of our social order and all its representatives. They dodge the law, smoke pot, drive hilariously the wrong way down a one-way street, roar through pedestrian arcades and jump their car neatly into a moving railway wagon. In their complete disregard of all the rules and regulations that govern our lives they seem to be indulging in a form of anarchy. But it's all so good-natured, so innocent, so delightfully naughty (in the meaning it had before the days of soft porn and blue pencils) that criticism is almost totally disarmed.

It's in the way it treats all figures of authority that Goodbye Pork Pie is perhaps most typically New Zealand. We have a long tradition of regarding anyone in uniform as fair game, especially when they're 'most ignorant of what they're most assured'. Goodbye Pork Pie (a title as obscure as it is appropriate) makes its policemen, traffic officers, bus station attendants and other guardians of public conformity into figures of fun without ever falling into the error of being malicious. For some of its other visual jokes response may vary according to regions. The Wellington audience I was in, for instance, had no reaction to the sight of the Mini driving glumly along a rainswept motorway past an endless grey vista of high-rise office buildings. It made a sharp contrast to the sunny skies both north and south, but Wellington's populace may have been too conditioned to get the point.

After the Wellington episode (with Bruno Lawrence as a melodramatically shady 'Mr Big') the tearaways cross Cook Strait, courtesy of an unwitting NZR, and continue south in a waqon they fit up as a sort of 'crash pad'. To me, the Wellington scenes were a bit too contrived, scarcely matching the freewheeling action of the rest of the film; and I found them marred by poor sound quality. Having got their trio to the South Island the writers seemed to lose their grip slightly, spending too long in the railway wagon, and then going off an a sidetrack to the West Coast. Were they tempted by the scenery? Pity if that's all it was, because elsewhere the backgrounds were handled tactfully, never intruding. I wonder if there wasn't some uncertainty with the girl, Shirl, who disappeared at this point - although her fate was neatly explained later as another link in the story. It was interesting to realise that, for all its cavalier way with convention, Goodbye Pork Pie followed the old Hollywood tradition: you can let your characters cheat, steal, lie and commit murder - so long as the law catches up with them in the end.

The fact that Goodbye Pork Pie has already made such a worldwide impact is a tribute to its professional finish. The expertise that's gone into its making shows at almost every point - from Geoff Murphy's superbly controlled direction to Alun Bollinger's first-class photography to John Charles' cleverly integrated music (conducted at a recording session by an uncredited Larry Pruden). The acting by a big cast is uniformly of that quality we now accept as normal in New Zealand productions - although I felt that Claire Oberman as 'Shirl' was less at home with her role than the others, particularly Kelly Johnson and Tony Barry who made the 'Blondini Gang' comically attractive.

If hats must be taken off to anyone behind the camera it is to the stuntmen and the stunt co-ordinators. Rarely has a film been so dependent on the split-second timing and amazing skill that is their stock in trade. Youngsters in the audience cheered their heads off, older heads were shaken in disbelief. It was neat. It was mighty. It was Wow! and Gee! and Look at that! And then it was - reluctantly - Goodbye Pork Pie.

- Peter Harcourt, ""Sequence"", March 1981.

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