There is a scene early in director Sandy Harbutt’s inimitable 1974 road movie Stone in which a motorcycle, cruising down an ocean-hugging street on a bright sunny day, is nudged off the cliff by a car. Harbutt cuts to a long shot of the location (Lurline Bay in New South Wales), capturing the rider displaced from his bike and following his vehicle headfirst in a spectacular airborne trajectory off the steep rocky precipice into waters below.
The spirit of Harbutt’s film exists in that moment: a heady concoction of courage, recklessness and noodle-scratching bravado. Those attributes would come to define the “Ozploitation” genre, of which Stone was an early proponent. The storyline is uncomplicated, concerning a cop who goes undercover with a bunch of bikies called the Gravediggers, but Harbutt’s execution is wildly inventive.
Roaring into Australian cinemas five years before a certain leather-clad road warrior raised hell in a dystopian dust-riddled future, Stone is for bikes what Mad Max was for cars: an anti-conventional head trip seemingly powered by lunatics and splattered with striking aesthetic flourishes. Some work better than others, and the storyline is unevenly paced and structured. But the cumulative effect – something akin to watching celluloid soaked in LSD and set on fire – is a perfect fit with the marketing tagline used to sell it: “Take the trip”.
Stone was an inspiration for George Miller’s more famous film, which recruited three of Harbutt’s cast members (Hugh Keays-Byrne, Roger Ward and Vincent Gil). It is not a stretch to suggest the title of Miller’s fuel-guzzling franchise is itself a hat tip to Stone, given one of the members of the Gravediggers is named Bad Max (Jim Walsh).
The ride kicks off at a political rally in the Domain in Sydney, where a pollie pledging to do something to curb pollution is assassinated with a long-range rifle. The assassin thinks bikie Toad (Hugh Keayes-Byrne) has witnessed the crime. It’s a reasonable assumption, given the frazzled double denim-clad dirtbag appears to be looking his way, but the killer has no way of knowing Toad is wasted on acid and tripping balls.
One by one the Gravediggers – a group of Satan worshippers who live in a fortress by the sea, naturally – get picked off. The police fear an outbreak of gang-related crime if they don’t get to bottom of who’s behind it thus the arrival of Stone (Ken Shorter, who played a strike-breaking scab in 1975’s Sunday Too Far Away). He is reluctantly embraced by the Gravediggers and poses as one of them, instructed to “ride at the back and keep your spanners off our moles”. After a neatly plotted first act, the storyline becomes hazier and haphazard, with a number of creatively-framed riding scenes topped off by a savagely amoral ending.
This may go some way in explaining why response from critics at the time was mixed at best, though the film’s status as a watershed production is indisputable. Stone became the first widely distributed movie to deal with the Australian bikie experience, and does so with a great deal more authenticity than American pictures such as 1953’s The Wild One and 1969’s Easy Rider. Its genuineness was no doubt partly a result of Harbutt and his crew working in collaboration with the Hells Angels. Despite what seem like crazy touches – including a character with an eye patch called Dr Death – Stone was hailed by bikers as an honest depiction of their lifestyle.
The audience never left it, and to this day the film is endlessly rewatched by fans – among them Quentin Tarantino, who brought it to the big screen in Hollywood in 2011) – and even inspired appreciation societies. Made on a budget of $195,000, Stone collected about $1.5m at the local box office (which, adjusted for inflation, is just under $10m) thus becoming one of the most profitable Australian films released.
To mark its 25th anniversary, more than 30,000 motorcyclists gathered in Sydney to celebrate it and recreate its famous funeral scene, featuring a casket transported on the open road. This scene is one of a number of once-seen-never-forgotten moments: strange and perversely iconic, made at a time when a new breed of devil-may-care film-makers were not so much breaking the rules as defining new kinds of extremities.
