Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 18

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Popular Culture Review
the countryside. No solution was found in the city, in journalism, or in
studies — but in an unlikely rural and unexplored prospect.
However, through it all, the Maori knew who they were — which
was more than you could say for the typical Pakeha of the time. Like
Tom Sullivan, he barely knew where he was going or what he was
buying into if he married a Maori girl. Actually — and ironically —
the film was made as Maoridom was about to be plunged into wholesale
urbanization which was to radically alter their whole way of life.
For the young man in Runaway, a dozen years later, there was more
definition about identity. He did display that nascent spark of enquiry
starting to mark Pakeha New Zealanders, the conscious search for
identity that had run through the literature of the previous two decades,
notably with the poets — Cumow, Mason, Glover, Fairbum — and
the novelists Frank Sarageson and John Mulgan.
In Runaway, young David Manning was very consciously trying to
find out what it was all about — and this time he knew neither an
ordinary Kiwi city girl nor a Maori girl were for him. Lured by the
seductive if superficial enticements of a European woman, he got singed
by the flame of her deception in much the same way the country was
finding Britain’s links with Europe were going to damage the country’s
trade and prosperity.
We’d made a film about New Zealand and the EEC before the
screenplay — though not the concept — for Runaway was written and
the allegory was, we thought, fairly direct. So few people got the point
I wondered myself whether I’d missed it. (O’Shea 44)

Following the commercial debacle of Runaway, O ’Shea needed to find a way
to put Pacific Films back on an even financial footing. Ironically, it was an angry
conversation with Sid Odell, head of the National Film Unit at the time, that provided
the spark for O ’Shea’s next project, the musical Don’t Let It Get You (1966). Furious
at the pessimistic picture of New Zealand life shown in Runaway, Odell promised
O ’Shea at a meeting to discuss “future projects” that “you’ll never make another
feature film in this country. Never!” (O’Shea 46). Furious, O’Shea vowed that his
next film would be both a commercially viable film, and one that would further the
cause of race relations in New Zealand. The result was a pop musical reminiscent
o f Richard Lester’s A Hard Days Night (1964), full of flash, flair, and cheerfully
upbeat pop performances, from a thoroughly racially-integrated cast. When one
considers that it was not until 1970 that New Zealand television allowed Maori
and white performers to appear in the same television commercial (for Gregg’s
Coffee, made by Pacific Films, and directed by Runaway's cinematographer, Tony