Bruce Spence Movies

This comedy, based on Barry Oakley's popular novel Salute to the Great McCarthy chronicles the adventurous and amorous exploits of an Australian country boy. The whole mess begins when the strapping lad is kidnapped and taken to Melbourne to play Australian Rules Football. The perpetrator and owner of the team is Colonel Humphries who also gives the young man a job in his insurance company. There the lad has great fun making love to a series of women--including the colonel's daughter. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Dennis Hopper plays the title character in this true story of a 19th-century Australian gold-digger who is pressed into a life of crime. A six-year stint in jail doesn't provide reform, but does introduce him to an Aboriginal partner-in-crime (David Gulpilil). The duo then proceed to terrorize the province of New South Wales with no lack of violence. The TV version was retitled Mad Dog. ~ John Bush, All Movie Guide

The Australian Eliza Fraser tries for the wig-and-bodice bawdiness of Tom Jones. The title character, played by Susannah York, is an 18th century lass who is shipwrecked together with Trevor Howard on a remote Australian island. Her lively exploits among the refugees help to make Eliza famous--or rather, notorious--throughout the British empire. Once rescued, Eliza earns her keep at county fairs by regaling audiences with her own tales of her adventures. Tim Burstall both wrote and directed Eliza Fraser from an original screenplay by David Williamson. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Norman Panama's penultimate directorial effort, Barnaby and Me was originally filmed for Australian television. The title character is a talented Koala Bear, who is to Australian fans what Benji is to Americans. Pausing in his escape from a vengeful mobster, American con artist Caesar falls in love with Juliet Mills, whose daughter Sally Boyden keeps Barnaby as her pet. The kooky koala teans up with Caesar for a series of picaresque adventures. It's hardly The Sting, but it's easy to take. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A London newspaper correspondent travels to the colorful town of Dimboola, Australia to write a story, and has many delightful experiences with the locals in this charming, exceptionally well-filmed comedy. For him, the fun begins when he sees that a major wedding is about to occur. For a lark, he dresses up as a woman and crashes the bride's shower. Next he goes to the bawdy stag party and learns all sorts of interesting secrets about the bride and groom. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Poorly acted, unintentionally funny in parts, and with transparent literary pretensions, this horror film is about a well-established screenwriter who loses the ability to distinguish between his fantasy world and the real world -- with disastrous consequences. As he ruminates on his place in any world and loses his grip, he also loses his wife (not misplaced, she leaves him) and his children's respect, and critics tear him apart. The final undoing of this screenwriter is a deadline that must be met at all costs -- and the costs turn out to be too great. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

The Australian-made Buddies is essentially a Down Under gold rush western. Two friends in Queensland team up with a miner and his girl friend to search for diamonds. Their quest is threatened by a gang of slavering claim-jumpers. Colin Friels, Harold Hopkins, Dennis Miller and Kris McQuade (the girl) are the protagonists in this attractive location-filmed effort. The Australian film Buddies is sometimes confused with an unrelated U.S. produced AIDS-related drama of the same title. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Flawed by very uneven acting and technical problems, this black comedy about a near-rape and its consequences takes a cue from Hamlet in its resolution of unwanted villains. The story is set in 1966 in a remote town on the coast of New Zealand, a place where the unusual never happens. Yet when Sam Jamieson (Peter McCauley) catches a truck driver trying to rape Sam's pregnant Maori wife (Jillian O'Brien), he kills the trucker in the ensuing fist-fight and tells the police the death was an accident -- and they believe it. The trucker's brother later comes at Sam in revenge and is also killed. Once again, the police accept the brother's death as an accident. But another couple in the town know what happened and opt for blackmailing Sam, rather than going to the police with their story -- by all accounts, the police are not likely to believe them anyway. Sam and his wife have no choice but to suffer the blackmailers bleeding them dry -- until a jaunty Brit aristocrat (Bruce Spence) arrives on the scene and figures out a way to set things right. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

About 15 years after the events of Mad Max 2, nuclear war has finally destroyed what little was left of civilization. Grizzled and older, former cop Max (Mel Gibson) roams the Australian desert in a camel-drawn vehicle -- until father-and-son thieves Jebediah Sr. (Bruce Spence) and Jr. (Adam Cockburn) use their jury-rigged airplane to steal his possessions and means of transportation. Max soon winds up in Bartertown, a cesspool of post-apocalyptic capitalism powered by methane-rich pig manure and overseen by two competing overlords, Aunty Entity (Tina Turner) and Master (Angelo Rossitto), a crafty midget who rides around on the back of his hulking underling, Blaster (Paul Larsson). Seeking to re-equip himself, Max strikes a deal with the haughty Aunty to kill Blaster in ritualized combat inside Thunderdome, a giant jungle gym where Bartertown's conflicts are played out in a postmodern update of blood and circuses. Although Max manages to fell the mighty Blaster, he refuses to kill him after realizing the brute is actually a retarded boy. Aunty's henchmen murder Blaster nonetheless, then punish Max for violating the law that "Two men enter, one man leaves." Lashed to the back of a hapless pack animal and sent out into a sandstorm, a near-death Max is rescued by a band of tribal children and teens. The descendants of the victims of an airplane crash, the kids inhabit a lush valley and wait for the day when Captain Walker, the plane's pilot, will return to lead them back to civilization. Some of the children, refusing to believe that Max isn't Walker and that the glorious cities of their mythology no longer exist, set off in search of civilization on their own. Max and three tribe members must then rescue their friends from Bordertown and the clutches of Aunty Entity -- a quest that ends in a lengthy desert chase sequence that echoes the first two Mad Max films. Spence also appeared in Mad Max 2 in a different role, that of the Gyro Captain. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Dot Bloom (Lyn Pierse) is a 32-year-old Jewish woman who contemplates whether she should choose a man to settle down with in this light romantic comedy. She aspires to be a serious writer while making a living writing for a popular soap opera. With her politically active mother off helping the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Dot's Aunt Esther (Ruth Yaffe) looks out for her favorite niece. She turns down her suggestion to date a gynecologist and hooks up with the boring, divorced attorney Karl (Kim Gyngell), an old college friend. Alistair (Bruce Spence) is a charming but shy computer devotee who asks her for a date via cyberspace, but she neglects to read her E-mail. Dot goes through a number of comedic circumstances as she experiences the unpredictability of the dating game. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

The life of a teen in an isolated small town is the subject of Australian writer/director John Duigan's film, set in 1962 in New South Wales. Duigan's coming-of-age story has many familiar elements -- Danny Embling (Noah Taylor) discovers his sexual attraction to a childhood playmate (Leone Carmen as Freya), he undergoes the taunts of bullies at his school, rages against the narrow-minded views of his parents and many of the townspeople, and comes under the influence of a sympathetic adult (Bruce Spence as Jonah, a would-be writer who lives in an abandoned railroad car). The twist is that Danny's rival for Freya's affections, Trevor (Ben Mendelsohn), is a Jewish jock who becomes Danny's friend by standing up to the bullies and treating Freya with more respect than the other boys do. Duigan, who had been making films in Australia since the mid-'70s, broke through to U.S. audiences with this film and its sequel, Flirting, in which Noah Taylor reprises the lead role. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide