Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 17

John O’Shea and the Tradition of New Zealand Cinema

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Michaelangelo Antonioni nearly every night during shooting on a portable 16mm
projector to “keep the crew in the right mood for what we were trying to do”
(Dixon interview). But although O’Shea undeniably achieved his goal with the
film, both the public, and government officials, found his vision of life in bourgeois
New Zealand unsettling and depressing.
Although praised by the critics, Runaway was a hit only with a select few, and
in its initial engagements the film was a resounding commercial failure. To add
insult to injury, the film was exported to England, cut from 102 minutes to 80
minutes, and released on the bottom-half of British double-bills as Runaway Killers,
the version that most widely survives today. The complete, uncut version of
Runaway is available only at the New Zealand Film Archive, where I screened the
film shortly before interviewing John O’Shea. It is a remarkable film, recalling the
best of Joseph Losey, Tony Richardson and/or Karel Reisz, and deserves a place in
the international canon of film history alongside such films as Losey’s Accident
(1967), The Servant (1963), Richardson’s The Loneliness o f theJLong Distance
Runner (1962), or Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and SundayJAorning (1960).
Although the film has now attained the status of a cult classic, particularly among
younger New Zealand filmmakers, the commercial failure of Runaway plunged
O ’Shea’s Pacific Films deep into debt, and O ’Shea was forced to make industrial
films and commercials for some 14 years to pay off the film’s still-modest production
cost.
While Broken Barrier had made back its initial production cost with ease,
perhaps because of its more compassionate and optimistic outlook, Runaway marked
O’Shea as a troublemaker, and left general audiences both angry and confused. As
O’Shea commented in his autobiography,
For a start, Broken Barrier was about a white male, Tom Sullivan,
who according to the poster ‘was in love with a Maori girl’. The white
women seen in the film are all middle-class and very bourgeois. Some,
like his sister, with a budgie on her shoulder, are a little bizarre. They
clearly indicate their distance from the Maori women of that time.
Tom’s father is rather more typical of the New Zealand male of that
era: stem, forced to accept foolishness all around him — his daughter
smoking, his son carrying on with a Maori girl, his wife fussing around
and trying to be nice to everyone — clearly, in his eyes, a rather stupid
woman.
The young man in Broken Barrier seems to me now to be more of
a simpleminded idealist, not so much searching for identity as chancing
across a rom antic entanglem ent that leads him to a greater
understanding of the Maori people around him once he gets out into