Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 16

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Popular Culture Review

Royal Tour in 1953 for Movietone, Pathe, Visnews and Telenews simultaneously
by shooting with three 35mm movie cameras simultaneously mounted on the same
tripod, to create three individual negatives for each newsreel concern — a sharp
bit of ingenuity (O’Shea 43).
It was not until 1964 that O’Shea would have a chance to create another feature,
Runaway (1964), which is arguably his best film, and one of the most telling New
Zealand films concerning the relations between Pakeha and Maori culture. Runaway,
shot for £28,000, again without synchronized dialogue (but this time, dubbed in
after the fact so flawlessly that the absence of direct sound recording is hardly
noticeable), tells the story of a young man, David Manning (Colin Broadley) who
has been living above his means, and must now pay back a considerable debt. His
mother and father are harsh and unsympathetic, and so Manning hits the road to
escape his problems, and perhaps find a meaning for his increasingly difficult
existence. He hitches a ride with Laura Kossovich (Nadja Regin) and the two
engage in a brief but tempestuous love affair, which is interrupted when David
shows a passing interest in Isobel Wharewera (Kiri Te Kanawa), a young Maori
woman whose values seem more in keeping with his own. After a fight, David
steals Laura’s car, and leaves Diana on a muddy strip of beach, angrily vowing
revenge. Now on the run from the police for car theft, David abandons Laura’s car
and hitches a ride with a particularly obnoxious businessman with a heart condition,
who reveals himself as a virulent racist and viciously opportunistic capitalist during
their increasingly tense conversation. To prove how little he cares for others, the
businessman deliberately swerves to run over a hedgehog crossing the road. David
is appalled, and grabs the steering wheel to wrest control of the car away from the
businessman, but the strain proves too much, and the man dies of a heart attack, in
a scene eerily reminiscent of Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945).
Taking the businessman’s papers, David continues on alone until he meets
Diana (Deidre McCarron), who offers him both reassurance, and a renewed sense
o f hope. Their idyll is ended, however, when a passing trapper, Clarrie (Barry
Crump), invades the small shack the couple are hiding in. Clarrie turns David into
the police for the reward, and David is forced to flee again, this time into the snowcovered mountains, with Laura at his side. At length, David tells Diana to go back
and surrender to the police; he will go on alone. The police abandon the search as
being too dangerous, and David is last seen hiking further and further up the
mountain, to certain death. The film is both concise and evocative; David Manning
is the perfect existential 1960s antihero, and the film’s crisp, melancholy black
and white cinematography (by Anthony Williams) and cool, detached musical score
(by Robin M acOnie) effectively convey David M anning’s alienation and
hopelessness through a Pinteresque landscape of despair and compromise. Indeed,
O ’Shea told me during our interview that he screened the early work of