Starts with a spear duel between two aboriginals – exciting except one is played by Kamahl. Then we meet an aboriginal black tracker played by Ed Devereux in black make up – very funny though not as funny as his blackfella voice. (To make it worse there are some genuine aboriginal actors playing his family).
American Konrad Matthaei plays a new police officer from Melbourne, a stuffed shirt who has come on special assignment – to arrest an aboriginal who has committed a tribal killing that the experienced local copper has let slide. Matthaei goes with Devereaux to arrest Kamahl – it’s a long ride there. Apart from the cast (Matthaei is wooden as well), the film’s main problem is structural – there is no urgency in the trip and not much interesting happens on the way.
The two police find the tribe, there’s a corroborree where Devereaux gets the bone pointed at him, Kamahl gives himself up to avoid trouble, they go back but are followed by the aborigines. evereaux feels the call of the wild, so to speak but all the while Matthaei is priggish and not at all understanding. Then Devereaux winds up dead, the horses are run off, Matthaei figures out it’s a trap so that he will die in the desert not with a spear in his back; they wind up staggering through the desert, Matthaei goes a bit funny in the head and chats away to Kamahl who can’t speak English, then he hallucinates. But Kamahl goes to get the experienced sergeant (Ron Morse) in time to rescue Matthaei – and Matthaei escorts Kamahl back to Melbourne, determined to show head office that we shouldn’t convict Kamahl because “it’s our law not theirs,” etc, etc. Is that the job of a policeman?
Anyway, muddled liberalism isn’t the worst fault of this dull film, which after the giggles from seeing Devereaux subside, just becomes boring. There are some pretty shots of the outback and a neat match cut from Matthaei digging into the ground to the pouring of a beer in town.
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