‘Smash Palace’ has Melbourne showing

Press, 8 January 1983, Page 4

‘Smash Palace’ has Melbourne showing

NZPA Sydney The New Zealand film. "Smash Palace." has at last had a showing in Australia and has been accorded a . generally favourable review in the Melbourne "Age." A film critic. Philippa Hawker, wrote that Roger Donaldson's "Smash Palace" was an assured, volatile work that for the most part succeeded in being both overwrought and entertaining. The film is being shbwn in Melbourne but has yet to appear in Sydney. The Melbourne "Age" reviewer said that "Smash Palace" had a • number of neat reversals of audience expectation where it lured the watcher into anticipating a certain type of scene or emotional mood, then turned the tables.

"It is a cleverly manipulative film, in many ways, some effective, some not." she said

Bruno Lawrence's per- I formance as the racing i driver, Al Shaw, "has a care- I fully balanced mixture of : gentleness and ugly irra- : tionality. and until the final \ stages of the film Donaldson manages to avoid aligning i the film's sympathies with j Shaw." she said. J "In those last scenes. Don- i aldson seems to lose touch : with the bleak, yet accom- i plished style that character- ! ised the film, and becomes I merelv clever." j