Mr. Reliable
Starring
Colin Friels and Jacqueline McKenzie
"Anywhere else in the world they would have shot
the shit out of him, but not here - we're going to have a wedding"
And
what a wedding it is. When Wally Mellish (Colin Friels) and Beryl (Jacqueline
McKenzie) move in together he gives the place a little bit of class with a
couple of Jaguar hood ornaments stolen from the local car yard.
Enter the New South Wales police to save the world from larrikan loafers everywhere. Within minutes in film time, Wally and Beryl's poor house in outer Sydney is the site of one of the great Aussie barbies.
Police
in uniform, a '60s SWAT team, a bloke with 200 pounds of sausages, vans of
free-love hippies with anti-Vietnam War slogans and assorted Australian families
converge on the dirt road where Wally has sworn to be Mr Reliable from now on.
And of course there is the gaggle of media types including all three television
stations. And Norm Allen, the
police commissioner, on the spot, determined to prevent the kind of publicity
the anti-war riots were garnering his force.
Colin Friels, who played the scheming suited lawyer in Class Action throws his whole body into playing Wally, the awkward, style-less, uneducated ne'er-do-well.
Mr Reliable is based on a true story. How faithfully is a matter of opinion. According to some in the film industry, the film story is more important that the facts, but let's take this film at face value. Wally and Beryl and her two-year-old lived surrounded by police and rubber-necks for 8 days during which they were married (with the police commissioner as best man) and eventually they were freed without charges.
Pieces of history like this fill the newspapers and television screens and then disappear. We forget them in the rush of the next sensation. But mistakes, they say, must be learned from or they are doomed to be repeated, and this was one glorious stuff-up.
If
you can forgive the scripters for writing "It's a strange bloody
country", then this is a piece of Australian history well worth revisiting.