Blu-ray Review: Richard Franklin’s Road Games Joins the Shout! Factory

An exhaustive array of special features helps make up for a merely adequate audio-visual presentation of this Hitchcockian Ozploitation gem.

Road GamesRichard Franklin’s Road Games is a hard-charging highway thriller that tears its way through the resplendent emptiness of the Australian Outback. Franklin, an ardent Hitchcock-ophile, craftily inverts some of the master’s most famous thrills, beginning with the film’s first major jolt: a reversal of the famous Psycho shower scene in which a shadowy figure exits a steamy motel bathroom and kills the naked woman waiting for him on his bed. From there, Road Games develops into what is essentially a riff on Rear Window, transplanting that film’s narrative about a voyeuristic amateur detective from a Greenwich Village apartment building to an isolated freeway in southern Australia’s arid Nullarbor Plain.

Pat Quid (Stacy Keach), an eccentric American long-haul trucker with a penchant for quoting Chaucer, keeps himself entertained on long, sleepless drives by picking up hitchhikers and rambling at his pet dingo, Boswell. After observing some suspicious activity involving the driver of a green camper van, Quid begins to suspect the man may be behind a recent spate of murders of young women. While hauling a trailer full of meat cross-country, Quid picks up a saucy young “walkaway,” dubbing her Hitch (Jamie Lee Curtis)—a rather unsubtle nod to Franklin’s filmmaking idol—who starts playing Watson to Quid’s Sherlock Holmes. The duo tracks the green van to a truck stop where Quid corners a man he thinks is the murderer in a bathroom stall. But after finding he’s confronted the wrong guy, Quid walks out of the restroom to find the van has made off with Hitch inside.

The tension ramps up as Quid sets out to find Hitch, bring the mystery murderer to justice, and prove to incompetent local authorities that he isn’t the killer. Franklin handles the suspense with a canny meticulousness, relying on a gradual escalation of narrative stakes rather than cheap shocks or gratuitous violence (though the opening murder scene, composed of jagged, giallo-esque close-ups of gloved hands strangling a woman with a guitar string, certainly leaves a savage impact). For much of its runtime, this is a one-man—and one-dog—show, with Quid cracking wise purely for his own amusement. Quid’s monologues are slightly over-written, with a reliance on overly cutesy patter about his fellow travelers; for example, he dubs a sniffling motorcyclist Sneezy Rider (Robert Thompson). But Keach delivers even the corniest jokes with a hearty swagger that makes Quid hard not to like, and his congenial charm is leavened with just a touch of vulnerability, evident in the defensive tone his voice adopts when he protests, “Just because I drive a truck doesn’t make me a truck driver.”

Advertisement

Franklin’s action set pieces are carefully crafted and deceptively elaborate, executing complicated choreography involving multiple high-powered vehicles with a clear eye and steady hand (shades of Steven Spielberg’s Duel). The film’s pièce de résistance is a climactic confrontation in which Quid’s massive tractor trailer becomes lodged in a narrow alleyway, stuck between the green van in front and a cop car behind. The sequence cleverly confounds our expectations of a blowout car chase, instead restricting the vehicular action to as confined a space as possible. The result is a hugely satisfying and uniquely claustrophobic finish to a film that largely trades on the vast open expanses of its Outback setting.

There is, however, a certain mechanical, calculated quality to the film. Road Games offers occasional hints at political and psychological subtexts: a militant butchers’ strike; a misogynistic slasher; and a roadside bar featuring murals of colonial violence on the walls (surveyed in an almost Godardian 360-degree panning shot). But Franklin never does anything with any of these tantalizing threads. He’s content to simply tell a ripping good yarn. The “wrong man” angle of the film is little more than a plot mechanism, totally lacking the palpable terror of false imprisonment that Hitchcock imbues into even his lighter entertainments like North by Northwest. And the romance between Quid and Hitch, while enlivened by Curtis’s brassy playfulness, feels sexless, is almost perfunctory.

While its taut suspense certainly earns it the comparisons to Hitchcock that it so clearly craves, ultimately, Road Games ends up highlighting what makes his work so much more powerful. Franklin evinces none of Hitchcock’s genius for infusing his work with his singular neuroses, compulsions, and fears. Franklin has clearly studied the master of suspense’s impeccable technique, but his film contains little of Hitch’s soul.

Advertisement

Image/Sound

The film’s vibrant colors and sweeping vistas of the flat, treeless Nullarbor Plains really pop on Shout! Factory’s Blu-ray release. The scan used preserves a pleasantly grainy film texture, which is true to Road Games’s relatively low-budget origins. However, little effort has been made to clean up the print, as specks of dust and debris are visible throughout the film, as is a slight discoloration around the edges of the frame in several scenes. The lossless monaural soundtrack is crisp and full, though this doesn’t always serve the film well, as its sound design can at times be crowded and shrill. The sonic elements are mostly well-balanced, though Brian May’s odd score, which combines martial drumming and harmonica melodies, seems slightly too loud at times. Overall, though, this is a more-than-serviceable presentation of a film that has been woefully unavailable on home video in the U.S. for over 15 years.

Extras

Shout! has packed this release to the gills with extras, including two commentary tracks, one with director Richard Franklin and another with cinematographer Vincent Morgan, production coordinator Helen Watts, costume designer Aphrodite Kondos, and moderated by director Mark Hartley. Both offer juicy reminiscences about the film’s arduous and financially troubled production. The disc also features interviews with Franklin, Stacy Keach, Jamie Lee Curtis, and several others, including a number of extended interviews filmed for Hartley’s Ozploitation documentary Not Quite Hollywood. Shout! has also included a making-of doc, “Kangaroo Hitchcock,” audio of a full script read from 1980, a lecture on the making of the film from the same year featuring Franklin, May, co-producer Barbi Taylor, and critic Tom Ryan, and a stills and poster gallery accompanied by demos of May’s score. All in all, it’s hard to conceive of a more thorough selection of extras to accompany this film than the one Shout! has assembled.

Overall

An exhaustive array of special features helps make up for a merely adequate audio-visual presentation of this Hitchcockian Ozploitation gem.

Advertisement
Score: 
 Cast: Stacy Keach, Jamie Lee Curtis, Marion Edward, Grant Page, Thaddeus Smith, Steve Millichamp, Alan Hopgood, John Murphy, Bill Stacey, Robert Thompson  Director: Richard Franklin  Screenwriter: Everett De Roche  Distributor: Shout! Factory  Running Time: 101 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1981  Release Date: November 12, 2019  Buy: Video

Keith Watson

Keith Watson is the proprietor of the Arkadin Cinema and Bar in St. Louis, Missouri.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.