WARNING: PLOT SPOILERS! 1971's Stork, while not technically a sex comedy, is one of the earliest Aussie films to feature topless nudity courtesy of Jacki Weaver and deals with the main character's cartoonish sex drive. Stork is a blue collar yahoo with Marxist aspirations (or in the words of one of the characters, a `six foot deranged revolutionary') played with manic enthusiasm by the gangly bespectacled Bruce Spence, much seen over the last 30 years but criminally underused in a slew of supporting roles. Stork quits his job at GMH to drop out and `join the bloody revolution'; being an Aussie male, he naturally is more concerned with footy and beer and his various paranoiac obsessions about his health and his virginity. Also a hopeless mooch, he crashes with his hapless mate Westy (Graeme Blundell) and ingratiates himself into his student pad much to the annoyance of flatmates Clyde and Tony, both of whom are dating emotionally uncommitted flower child Anna (Jacki Weaver) who Stork promptly labels `the Moll'. Her wildly spinning emotional compass soon swings around to his direction, and the gormlessly romantic Stork is smitten. During the film's rapid fire 90 minutes, urged along by Burstall's on-the-run 16mm camera, Stork manages to disrupt a university lecture, is almost eaten alive by a sexually voracious feminist, and charges into Anna's wedding to Tony in a firetruck, drenching the guests while quoting Marx through a loudspeaker.
In Stork's `one out, all out' satirical swipe, even modern art gets a heady serve. Stork imagines himself an art guru dabbling in `chunderscapes' by wolfing down a mountain of cheese and tallies; dream girl Anna declares his work `the most intoxicating new art form of the 20th Century.' David Williamson's script, based on his play `The Coming Of Stork' is so loaded to the bloody gills with ockerisms that it almost outdoes Bazza MacKenzie in the cultural cringe stakes. In fact I'm sure it's the first film that mentions that abominable term for going to the toilet - `to strangle a darkie' - while imagining himself as an Antarctic explorer next to Burstall's usual editor and cinematographer (and future directors of Alvin Rides Again), David Bilcock and Robin Copping.
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