Mr. Reliable

I had seen this film before and avoided it - suspecting it would leave me cringing. I did it a great injustice. This movie is very much in the vein of recent Aussie successes such as The Castle, and Muriel's Wedding - movies that take pride in the dry, wry, and laconic Aussie perspective on life. It had all the basic ingedients of a fun flick, charm, humour, good characters, bit of romance, and an interesting plot with a clever ending. If you see it, give it a try - you, like me, could be surprised. My vote 7/10

"Mr. Reliable is an excellent movie to watch in mixed company. Most importantly, all the Australian actor's dialects are understandable. The violence is limited to some wild shooting, there are bursts of biting comedy, and as the "hostage" drama progresses the outcome is always in doubt. In addition, a marvelous 60s soundtrack adds tremendously. Best of all, the entire story is based on fact. For a movie that is forty years old, it does not seem dated, even with the "flower power" dress and weird looking vintage automobiles. If the whole movie seems ridiculous, it is, and that is what keeps you watching to see how much further things can spiral out of control. Great movie. - MERK

MR. RELIABLE is a cool, relaxed and unusual mixture of comedy, crime and satire. It´s in the late sixties and Wally is a former prisoner who wants to settle down with his new girlfriend, but by a misunderstanding the couple and her little kid are trapped in a house on the Australian countryside, with the police thinking that Wally is holding the woman and the kid hostages. The film contains many charming and humoristic moments as the drama goes on, partly due to the crowd gathering outside the house. They have hippie parties and barbeques, some teenagers make love when a mother sees them, a journalist wants to interview Wally´s girlfriend about her underwear and so on. The filmmakers want to make a satire about media and people´s reactions to a tense situation, and I think they were inspired by Milos Forman´s HAIR and some "serious" hostage films. This is a cool film.

I am probably over critical of most Australian movies, basically on account of the cringe factor, ie,"Gees, they're not going to show THAT somewhere else, are they." Once in a while though, you come across a domestic gem, like "Muriels Wedding", "The Dish", "The Castle", and "Paperback Hero", which I just love to bits, and they seem to put the Australian idiom into some kind of sense, and I love ém. Well anyway, I just found another one to add to that list."Mr Reliable." I remember the incident in the late sixties, when Wally Mellish held his girlfriend/de facto, Beryl Muddle (Yes folks, they were their real names) up in a hostage situation for 5 or 6 days, and it was the talk of the media for a long while. Anyway, it is a lovely, funny, easy to watch little movie that is well worth wasting a couple of hours of your life on. I doubt very much whether Wally was such a likable idiot in real life, and Beryls legs probably didn't go all the way to the ground like they did in the movie, but it is a good watch. You can see the various scrapes that they get into coming a mile away, which really only give the whole thing a sense of inevitability. And it is a great snapshot of mid sixties Australia, in so many respects. The summer heat, the cars, the crowds, the emerging hippy culture, the xenophobia as regards "new Australians", the black and white television. Well worth a look.

I tripped over this today & had never heard of it but I said "Hmmm, Colin Friel, comedy? Let's give 'er a shot". As the previous poster said, it's along the lines of The Castle, and a few others from Down Under: The Dish, Strictly Ballroom, and Danny Deckchair. When the titles rolled I said "That was nice. I feel good." Can't ask for much more than that when you trip over a movie you've never heard of.

BTW, the quote "If you were my husband I'd poison your soup" was actually spoken at a dinner party by Lady Astor to Winston Churchill, but his reply was "Madam, if I were your husband, I would gladly drink it."- from the National Lampoon's 1973 "Wit & Witticisms of Winston Churchill