The Adventures of Barry McKenzie

Today Barry Humphries is known primarily as the alter-ego of purple-haired media queen Dame Edna Everage, but it should be remembered that he was also responsible for the altogether less-annoying character Barry McKenzie - a larrikin-ish Australian stereotype who originated in a comic strip aimed at British audiences. This film, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, was the first Australian movie to make a million dollars, and helped kickstart the modern Australian film industry as a result (prior to the 1970s our industry had been a poor cousin of the BBC). A work of parody that laughs as much at the British stereotype as it does at that of the unsophisticated Australian, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie is memorable if only for introducing audiences to the art of the on-screen chunder and other low-brow delights.



For barely-explained reasons, Barry McKenzie (Barry Crocker) and his Aunt Edna (Barry Humphries) are given instructions to travel to England in order to exchange cultural ideas with the British. Once there Barry finds himself embroiled in a series of misadventures that test his patience for 'pommy bastards'... he gets cast in an advertisement, gets drunk with Australian expats, fumbles his way through a sexual proposition, becomes a musical superstar, is mistaken for a homosexual, and gets invited onto British television. Through all this his voraciousness for beer remains undimmed, and he curses and exclaims his way across the country.



The Adventures of Barry McKenzie puts the Australian character on screen in a way that both represents all our worst qualities as perceived by the British and all our best ones as perceived by ourselves. An Australian viewer might watch this as a long extended joke at the expense of the British, whereas British audiences would cluck their tongues at how over-the-top we are. This is where the film's charm lies... there's no real plot to speak of, it's more or less just a series of sketches where the rather naive and easily-riled Barry interacts with stuck-up money-grubbing pommies. In various stages the film contrasts Barry's uncultured and sincere Australian-ness with British uptightness, intellectualism, alternative hippy culture, gay and lesbian culture, British TV and general high class snobbery. There's a running joke that the British will charge people through the teeth for all sorts of rubbishy crap and one character (Mr Gort) is amusingly given over to all kinds of private-school perversion, which should demonstrate the somewhat narrow and 'specialised' scope of this film's jokes.



On the flipside, it's implied that Australians eat vegemite straight from the jar and are both hugely homophobic and overtly racist (cue Barry's endearingly backwards observation, "Boy have they got a colour problem!") Great fun is also had in exposing Barry's typically Australian knowledge (or lack thereof) when it comes to sex... he reads what he calls a 'hygiene' book, The Perfumed Fanny, which bizarrely inspires him to dump a can of curried beef into his pants. I also had to laugh when Aunt Edna asked to take a snippet of some rhododendrons from the Gort family's garden - my mum used to do this all the time! It's probably the late 60s counter-culture that gets the harshest treatment of all though, with the film parodying their pacifism, political awareness and anti-materialism by suggesting that it's all a cover for capitalistic exploitation.



Anyway, it's not a film to be taken seriously by any stretch of the imagination. At first you might find Barry to be a bit too much of a dimwitted yob but you'll learn to love his simplistic tastes and neverending quest for beer by the film's end. I laughed a lot more than I expected to, and it made me feel strangely patriotic.



HIGHLIGHTS: The Adventures of Barry McKenzie is chock full of Aussie idioms, here's a few choice cuts: "Point percy at the porcelain", "Spear the bearded clam", "Shake hands with the unemployed", "Don't come the raw prawn with me" and "Fair suck of the sauce bottle".



Also, I loved this exchange...

(Psychiatrist) "What is your relationship to your mother?"

(Barry, rather perplexed) "...I'm her son".



DIRECTOR: Bruce Beresford

WRITER/SOURCE: Bruce Beresford and Barry Humphries, based on the comics by Barry Humphries and Nicholas Garland.

KEY ACTORS: Barry Crocker, Barry Humphries, Peter Cook, Spike Milligan, Dennis Price, Jenny Tomasin



RELATED TEXTS:

- The comic strips originally printed in the British comedy magazine Private Eye.

- This film was followed by a sequel, Barry McKenzie Holds His Own.

- The late 70s Australian film Dimboola features a British journalist coming to Australia for cultural purposes, which can be viewed of a reversal of The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.

- Crocodile Dundee is very much a direct descendent of Barry McKenzie.

- Sacha Baron Cohen satirises the prejudices of modern western culture in a similar (though somewhat more sophisticated) fashion in the films Borat and Bruno.