Title No: 4518
W I D E R SCREENINGS TM presents...
AUSTRALIAN CINEMA / DVD
RETURN OF CAPTAIN INVINCIBLE (1982)
UMBRELLA DVD (region 4)
d. Philippe Mora; pr. Andrew Gaty; scr. Steven E. DeSouza, Andrew Gaty; ph. Mike Molloy; m. William Motzing; ed. John Scott; cast. Alan Arkin, Christopher Lee, Kate Fitzpatrick, Graham Kennedy, Bill Hunter (101 mins)
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Philippe Mora's Intention to Create Australia's First Superhero Movie
The Return of Captain Invincible was set up by director Philippe Mora as Australia’s first superhero movie.
Indebted to American comic books and featuring an American actor (Alan Arkin) in the lead role, the completed film was taken out of the director’s control for much post-production interference and re-edited to make it, in the producer’s opinion, more suitable for the American market. As a result of this interference, many in the Australian film industry felt that the film did not succeed as a genuine Australian movie and thus should not qualify for the then lucrative tax exemptions offered Australian film productions. Director Mora protested the recutting of his film but eventually lost the case.
Alan Arkin stars as the eponymous superhero, once a public hero but soon disgraced in the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s and now living as a down and out alcoholic in Australia.
EXTRACT
When his old nemesis Mr. Midnight (Christopher Lee) steals plans for a secret US hypno-weapon, Arkin tries to bring back his super-heroic powers and once again save the world from destruction – if only he can remember how to fly. Obviously, the film is a spoof of the super-hero ethos and is never intended to be taken seriously as a comic book movie, instead giving sustained lip service to the American pop-culture medium as indeed director Mora has been want to do in several of his genre parody films (including the concurrently released Howling III).
Beginning with a hilarious pastiche of American newsreels of the 1950s, The Return of Captain Invincible neatly evokes the patriotic absurdity of the decade’s anti-communist fervour and its elevation of the superhero comic to populist art form. Absurdly overblown, the film balances the caricatured colours, production design and ridiculous plotting of American comic books with a gritty street realism in its portrait of the drunken ex-hero wandering Australia (incorporating several amusing cameos from genuine Aussie celebrities including Graham Kennedy and Bill Hunter). This strange concoction of comic book hyperbole, bizarre and fantastic plotting and self-conscious Australiana results in a comedic film which ruthlessly parodies American culture and its global influence.
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Camp Pathos & the Mockery of Americana
Indeed, the dislocation of an American superhero mythos to Australiana clearly reveals the absurdity of American culture, here expertly mocked and parodied.
There is a cruel bitterness here that is surprising, underlying a camp approach that owes also to Jim Sharman and such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show even to evoking the humanist pathos that Sharman brought to that film’s latter stages. Mora’s agenda here is the systematic debunking of the American myth of the individual hero, the sole saviour of the nation in times of strife. As Arkin the former superhero adjusts to normal life and tries to find once again his dormant super-strength, The Return of Captain Invincible tackles some of the realism that would influence the American Will Smith hit Hancock, although that film also took the superhero mythos far more respectfully than Mora, who ridicules it at every opportunity with increasing bitterness.
Camp parody and the satire of American popular culture by transplanting it into an Australian setting are the hallmarks of The Return of Captain Invincible. It is in this film that director Mora asserts the self-consciousness of genre parody that would infiltrate much of his later work, unusual considering his origins in documentary and such social portraits of Australian legend as the concurrently DVD released Mad Dog Morgan. It is also in The Return of Captain Invincible that Mora addresses the cultural incompatibility of American popular culture and Australian cinema, resulting in a peculiar cultural hybrid of pop superhero heroism and Aussie larrikin “taking the piss”.
It is in humbling and humiliating the superhero ethos as a genre that Mora debunks American pop culture, creating a clever, baroque one of a kind film that sadly never got the attention in Australia that it warranted.
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Postscript: Australia’s Tax Incentive Scheme and the Qualification of Australianism lands Mora in Court
In October 1980 the Australian government, in general agreement with the Australian Film Industry, launched tax concession regulations known as 10BA.
Under these concessions, investors could claim 150% concession on at risk investment and a 50% concession on any profit up to the invested amount. In order to qualify for this concession, certification had to be obtained from the Department of Home Affairs stating that the film was of sufficient “Australian content” to qualify for the 10BA concessions.Philippe Mora directed The Return of Captain Invincible, Australia’s first superhero movie, for producer Andrew Gaty of the Seven Keys company. In a dispute between them, Mora asserted that Gacy had re-edited his delivered cut of the film against his wishes, presumably to make it more palatable for the US market. When the dispute was brought before the Minister for Home Affairs, Tom McVeigh, who refused the film the certification necessary to qualify for the 10BA tax concessions. With the 150% tax deduction of his investors now at risk, producer Gaty appealed the decision in court. Gaty won and thereafter McVeigh introduced tighter guidelines required for the certification of a film as Australian. The dispute and court battle delayed the film’s release for a year.
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