The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie

(The Great American Chase, Chuck Jones & Phil Monroe, USA, 1979)

Introduction: This review was already “outdated” when it appeared in October 1980 (above it were printed the words: “Not currently on show”!), and it immediately sparked a theatrical moment of controversy, emanating from its distributor, Village Roadshow – whose Main Man, Alan Finney, came storming in near the end of my very first public lecture, denouncing my wrong-headed attitudes, opinions and errors! But the piece is special to me, not only because of that insane incident (a true baptism-by-fire in the ways of the mainstream film industry), but also for a much more positive reason. It was the first time I ever tried to express myself in writing that was free and uninhibited – not to mention a little cantankerous and polemical, picking the first of many fights with my “implied reader”! – because a friend had gently suggested to me: “Why don’t you write your articles the way you write your letters?” So, this was the first fruit of that radical self-improvement campaign. (8 February 2020)

Who is there in Australia who knows that this film exists, and is the work of the great Chuck Jones? For that matter, who has heard of Chuck Jones? Rarely has a major artist been so badly treated, by distributors and public alike – and by film critics, too.

The Great American Chase, having now undergone the indignity of a title change (to The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie), (1) will probably be around for a while, surfacing at children’s matinees and school holidays. But you’ll have to look out for it: Colin Bennett isn’t going to tell you when it’s on. He (and I pick on him only because he’s typical) didn’t review it in the first place. (2)

What would be the good of me, here, venturing into an analysis of Jones’ animation, and of the Warner Bros cartoons of the 1940s and 1950s? Maybe you’ve seen some of them. But were you paying attention at the time? Or does the very word cartoon (so less dignified than animation) carry an ugly taint for you – marking those things that could never, ever be taken seriously by any serious person?

How can I talk to you about Chuck Jones?

All I can say is: go and see The Great American Chase. For Jones knows what he’s up against in the battle to be taken seriously as an artist by high and middlebrow culture, and he reflects upon it here – talking to himself at the start of the film, not to the audience who are elsewhere, at Star Wars perhaps (the credits of which Jones parodically mimics), not even to the smaller audience made up of all you fine-art film buffs. Where are you, now that Chuck Jones needs you?

Demand to see The Great American Chase – demand it of the Village theatre chain, of the Valhalla, the Carlton Moviehouse, the Universal (3) – demand it of your cinema lecturers, if you have them.

In this film, Jones helpfully provides a capsule history of comedy and its social functions. On one side: domesticity, boredom, repression. On the other: laughter, desire, liberation. The historical analysis is superficial, but the point is not. And we can take it further. Maybe the cinema that tells stories, that represents scenes, that does everything so professionally and cleanly (no spills, no excesses), this cinema that you and I have been brought up to love and respect … maybe it’s all too domestic, too parental, too well-ordered.

Where is my desire, my freedom, my jouissance, if not in these cartoons where anything goes and everything is possible? If Bugs Bunny wants something, he just has to whizz off-screen and get it. And what is off-screen? Nothing. Everything. Bogart could never do that. There are plenty of things Bogart could never do, and that his directors could never do – can’t take a story apart, speed it up, slow it down, tell it a hundred times, blow it up (literally, figuratively) … cannot, at one moment, refine the frame and the narrative down to absolute purity and, at another moment, cram it with a hundred colours, shapes, lines, shadows, movements.

Who does any of this, today? Or are we all too bored? How dare you mention to me your precious “auteurs” – Ford, Kubrick, Herzog? When did they ever make a film that they spoke from their desire; when did they write each image and sound? Cinécriture, and not copyright Agnès Varda, either! Or were they just too busy, these cultural heroes of yours, with the duties of storytelling, of human insight, of disciplining themselves and their audiences?

Too much discipline, far too domestic. Give me Chuck Jones, a manic collector of bits and pieces, bits of stories, bit of culture, bits of images and music. True text-man, a master-chef: it all goes around and around, not blended but floating, distinct – and interacting, a fabulous space of connections and relations in time and space. That’s a cartoon, you cinéphile!

Or rather: a good cartoon, a lovingly worked and crafted object. Not those assembly-line Flintstones, or those skimpily drawn advertisements or arty European shorts: the real thing. Maybe I could give you the benefit of the doubt; maybe that’s all you know, the only thing you’ve experienced so far. Or maybe not.

But you need Chuck Jones – you need (we all need) the connections he can help us make. And there are others, too, with surnames like Avery, Freleng, Clampett … but I won’t push my luck. I’m trying to sell you on just Jones and his Great American Chase.

Go see it. Then we might have something to talk over together.

NOTES (2020)

1. In fact, I had this factoid the wrong way around: The Great American Chase was, for a time, the “replacement” title, and the other is the official one that has since stuck. Mr Finney pointed this out on the day he publicly attacked me at the beginning of my career as a critic! back

2. Colin Bennett (1929-2022) was, for 25 years, the sole film critic for The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia. As such, he represented “the establishment” to me, and many other young cinephiles of the 1970s and ‘early ‘80s. In truth, he was a quite benevolent, cultivated, cinephile chap – formed in an earlier, festival/cine-club/Sight and Sound-following moment of Australian film culture, for sure, but no less knowledgeable or passionate about cinema for that. And he fought for many a “good cause” in the very fledgling film culture of the period, especially in the censorship wars. Little did we know that a much worse fate was on the way, when Bennett was ousted (not so long after this Bugs review appeared) and replaced with the abominable Neil Jillett, who held his ground in that critic’s chair until 1995 – when I took over! For tributes to Colin’s legacy and influence as a critic – including news of an archival interview and extracts from a memoir he wrote in 1995 – search Geoff Gardner’s excellent Film Alert 101 blog site (http://filmalert101.blogspot.com). back

3. Named here are three repertory arthouses operating in Melbourne at the time; all were gone by the mid 2000s. back

© Adrian Martin October 1980 / February 2020