Movie: Roadgames (Richard Franklin, 1981)
I should maybe explore more Ozploitation films, cause I greatly enjoyed this one about a poet truck driver who starts suspecting he is sharing tbe road with a killer in a green van. It starts off compelling enough with a naked woman playing guitar in a brighlty red-lit hotel room and a mysterious man dressed as a motorist who puts a wire around her neck. We never see her actually get killed and the scene is filmed in a much more overtly expressionistic way than anything before or after. The next morning Pat Quid (Stacy Keach), who had to sleep in his truck in front of the hotel, sees a stranger in one of the rooms suspiciously watching the garbage men do their job. The film gets only better from there, especially once Pat picks up hitchhiker Pamela (Jamie Lee Curtis). He may fall in love with her, but his most cherished companion will always be Boswell, a dingo (or a dog!)
Pat playfully annoys his co-passenger, calling her Hitch and is also shown to be the owner of a Hitchcock book. The film earns those comparisons, especially during a classic scene of mistaken identity, when it cuts between Pat confronting the potential killer in a public bathroom and Pamela, the daughter of an American diplomat, foraging in the seemingly empty green van. Of course, Pamela disappears, which turns Pat into an even more Hitchcockian character, who mistrusting his instincts essentially starts gaslighting himself. Director Franklin does a good job of leaving it open until the very end whether the man in the van is guilty or Pat's been too long on the road. He is a wonderful character, Pat, a sensitive, rational truck driver on his way to deliver meat from Melbourne to Perth. He likes to imagine the inner lives of the drivers, motorists and passengers he meets on the road, to quote poetry to his dingo and play word games with the passengers he picks up. He is also a former gun runner in Africa, currently possibly a scab, as implied by the radio news which keeps reminding us that the meat industry is in deep trouble because of a trucker strike, while the union boss can't be found anywhere.
Franlklin uses the wide outstretched roads, the lights surrounding them, and the cramped space in the truck to create some wonderfully stylized scenes reflecting Pat's doubts and unsettled state of mind. He is helped by Keach's terrific performance and his hesitant literary voiceover. Keach plays Pat as an experienced truck driver who can handle with an easy-going confidence anything within the parameters of his job. but also gets frazzled, confused and hurt in situations that aren't in his comfort zone. He is charming enough to seduce Pamela, but it's also easy to see why he could believe that she voluntariliy joined the man in the green van. That's also because Jamie Lee Curtis, who I've always found to be one of the coolest actresses, is in top form here as a self-assured flirty and fiery hitchhiker, looking for "excitement" in defiance of her stuffy elitist parents. Curtis and Keach get great support from a motley crew of Australian actors, playing the various, somewhat quirky, motorists Pat keeps encountering on his journey.
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