Peter Weir (1974)

Before Paris, Texas there was Paris, New South Wales but the setting for Peter Weir’s horror comedy is fictional.  The Cars That Ate Paris, Weir’s first or second feature depending on how you define feature[1], premiered (at the Sydney Film Festival) the year before his international breakthrough picture, Picnic at Hanging Rock.  BFI is running a Peter Weir retrospective throughout April 2026.  The Cars That Ate Paris snuck in a day early.

With Keith Gow and Piers Davies, Weir adapted the screenplay from his own short story.  The Cars That Ate Paris is a satirical take on a certain kind of small Australian town – a rural nowheresville.  Cars – or, rather, car accidents, on the unsafe roads in and beyond the town – are an important part of Paris life.  The locals scavenge the belongings of accident fatalities.  Injured survivors are taken to the town hospital, where the surgeon gives them lobotomies and keeps them as ‘veggies’ for medical experimentation.  The wrecked vehicles salvaged by young male Parisians are bizarrely adapted by their new owners for use in car gymkhanas, and worse.

The film’s first car smash is the climax to a kind of spoof commercial, featuring a glamorous young couple whose dolce vita comes to an abrupt end.  The second crash involves the Waldo brothers, George and Arthur.  George is killed instantly but Arthur (Terry Camilleri) survives.  He becomes a house guest of the Paris mayor, Len Kelly (John Meillon), his wife and their daughters, both adopted following the car accidents that orphaned them.  Arthur wants to get away from Paris but can’t:  there’s no public transport and he’s lost his confidence driving a car (after fatally running over an elderly pedestrian).  Len Kelly gets Arthur a job as a hospital orderly, then appoints him town parking inspector, which fans the flames of the generational feud already heating up between Paris’s established order, represented by the mayor, and the younger car-crazy delinquents.  This builds to a violent confrontation between the two sides on the night of the ‘pioneers’ ball’, an annual fancy-dress commemoration of Paris’s colonialist founding values.  The showdown results in the deaths of several citizens and literally destroys the fabric of the town.  Accident-prone wheels that sustained the local economy now, in their weaponised reincarnations, wreck the place.  By repeatedly ramming the mayor’s car into one of the hooligans, Arthur gets his driving mojo back.  He drives out of the town into the night.

This dusty locale, with building facades that turn out to be as insubstantial as they look, is reminiscent of small towns in Hollywood Westerns.  Weir’s action finale is tantamount to a shootout:  automotive horsepower stands in for horses-plus-guns.  Arthur Waldo is Antipodean kin to the Western stranger-in-town – a man arriving in an alien, corrupt environment and leaving it a changed place – never mind that he’s a fearfully mild-mannered version of the archetype.  Westerns often dramatise conflict between an essentially violent colonial past and a present that inherits and adapts such violence for its own purposes.  Peter Weir takes this American screen tradition and shows it as comically alive and kicking down under.

The ideas that shaped The Cars That Ate Paris sound better than the resulting film is.  Weir’s black humour may have been out there a half-century ago (by coincidence, Cars reached the screen the same year as Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles) but now seems unremarkable and strenuous.  The film is short (90 minutes) but long enough to be hard work.  It’s striking chiefly because it so little predicts the kind of filmmaker Peter Weir would soon become.  Much of the acting, even allowing that the characters are cartoons, is a bit ropy.  It’s fortunate the two main actors are honourable exceptions, particularly John Meillon.  The mayor’s heartfelt traditionalist address to the pioneers’ ball that will soon descend into mayhem is ridiculous but touching.

31 March 2026

[1] Weir’s Homedale (1971) runs 52 minutes.  His Wikipedia page labels the film – quasi-oxymoronically – as a ‘short feature’ …