The veteran film and television director George Miller – whose most celebrated work is the majestic Australian western The Man from Snowy River – died at the weekend aged 79. Any obituary of the Scottish-born film-maker must, in one of life’s slightly unfortunate kinks, acknowledge that he did not make the Mad Max movies – that’s a different George Miller, whose career also took off in the 1970s. Miller was a well-established director by the time his Mad Max namesake came along, working on popular TV shows including Homicide and Matlock Police.
His career hit the next level in 1982 with the aforementioned smash hit, a high-spirited adventure inspired by Banjo Paterson’s beloved poem and starring Tom Burlinson as the brumbie-herding stockman. The plot of The Man from Snowy River is old fashioned, following Burlinson’s Jim as he inherits his father’s land and proves his worth to the hard yakka locals. Yet it holds up well today, with a cracking pace and even a feminist undercurrent in the story of Sigrid Thornton’s Jessica, the daughter of a cranky station owner (Kirk Douglas) who rebels against her father’s conservative views of womanhood.
Miller directed with a broadly accessible, Hollywoodish sensibility, creating unpretentious films intended for wide audiences. His most notorious production was 1987’s Les Patterson Saves the World: an outrageously odd action movie starring Barry Humphries as a splotchy-faced Australian diplomat sent to the Middle East, where he gets embroiled in a terrorism plot involving biochemical warfare. The film’s many off-the-wall elements include one scene where the protagonist passes wind, creating a fireball that engulfs a man at a UN conference. Another is set in a malfunctioning revolving restaurant where the clientele are tossed around like salad ingredients.
Costing $7.3m and only grossing about $626,000 in local cinemas, the film was a massive flop that – according to legend – attracted the ire of Australia’s then-treasurer, Paul Keating. In his book The Avocado Plantation, the critic David Stratton wrote: “It is still rumoured in the industry today that federal treasurer Paul Keating, who attended, was so angry that he decided to end rorts in the film industry.”
Miller delivered plenty of other spectacular moments. Five minutes into The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter we see the protagonist, Bastian (Jonathan Brandis), climb to the top of a high diving tower. When he looks around we share his hallucinatory vision: the swimming pool disappears and is replaced by a series of erupting, fantastical waterfalls, pouring out over moss-covered cliffs. I watched this scene when I was a child and it never left me, lingering in my psyche long after I’d forgotten everything else in the film.
Another high-altitude moment in Miller’s oeuvre stars Superman himself: Christopher Reeve, who plays a US airmail pilot in 1985’s The Aviator. The film is unremarkable but the crash scene that strands the protagonist and his love interest (Rosanna Arquette) is a good ’un, with Reeves exclaiming, “Come on, baby, glide for me!” as his plane’s engine conks out over remote wilderness. A more uplifting, in fact downright gif-able moment occurs 20 minutes into 1997’s Zeus and Roxanne, when Miller depicts a dog (Zeus) riding on the back of a dolphin (Roxanne) after the latter saves the pooch from a shark attack.
The veteran director obviously did not agree with WC Fields’ advice to never work with animals or children; he returned to marine mammals in another child-friendly movie, 1994’s Andre, about a family who adopt a seal pup that forms a close connection with a seven-year-old girl. These family films – as well as, among others, 1987’s pleasant but Disneyfied Aussie Christmas movie Bushfire Moon – generally were not directed with a strong sense of artistry or personal style. But they’re underscored by gentle, life-affirming vibes that resonated with audiences.
In terms of Miller’s greatest cinematic achievement, all roads lead back to Snowy River. In the film’s spectacular final stretch, which unfolds to the sounds of stampeding hooves and Bruce Rowland’s epic score, the mountain men chasing a group of wild brumbies stop when the horses descend a steep incline. But Jim continues, cracking his whip in mid-air, rushing in where angels fear to tread, blurring the line between lunacy and bravery. It of course works out well for our hero, who brings the horses back and earns respect from the community. “He’s a man!” says one of the locals, prompting Jack Thompson to add: “The man from Snowy River.”
If this were the only production Miller directed, he would have made a highly significant contribution to the Australian film industry. But his career extended much further and he has left behind a large and colourful body of work.
