Bad Blood

Bad Blood is based on the true story of a massive 12-day manhunt on the West Coast of the South Island.

Bad Blood, New Zealand/United Kingdom, 1981

Southern Pictures
Director: Mike Newell
Producer: Andrew Brown
Executive producers: Mark Shivas, Al Burgess
Screenplay: Andrew Brown
Based on the book Manhunt: the story of Stanley Graham, by Howard Willis
Photography: Gary Hansen
Editor: Peter Hollywood
Production design: Kai Hawkins
Costumes: Joan Grimmond
Art direction: Stuart Freeman
Music: Richard Hartley

With: Jack Thompson (Stanley Graham), Carol Burns (Dorothy Graham), Dennis Lill (Ted Best), Donna Akersten (Doreen Bond), Martyn Sanderson (Les North), Marshall Napier (Trev Bond), Cliff Wood (Henry Growcott), David Copeland (George Lindsay), Elizabeth Watson (Pat Graham), Michael Teen (John Graham)

35mm, 113 minutes, PG–Contains violence

New Zealand 1941. A ragged Home Guard troop practice rifle drill. The faraway war casts an oddly threatening shadow over the small backwoods farming community, struggling from depression to enforced austerity. Local farmer Stan Graham cast another – his eccentricities escalate rapidly into dangerously irrational paranoia. Soon seven victims of his gun-crazy panic lie dead, and he becomes first the object of a huge manhunt, and eventually the subject of a national myth.

“Not all the battles of World War II took place in the war zone. Bad Blood recreates a bizarre incident that was exploited by the Nazi propagandist Lord Haw-Haw to suggest an axis invasion of New Zealand. Jack Thompson portrays Stanley Graham, a backwoods dairy farmer wit a violent temper and a passion for guns. Time, petty squabbles, and a manipulative wife set him at odds with his neighbours, segregating his family from their close-knit community. In October of 1941, local police come to his farm to investigate reports of threats made ad gunpoint towards passers-by. Graham’s festering paranoia explodes. What follows are thirteen days of chase through a dense green jungle, culminating in the most massive manhunt in New Zealand history. Director Mike Newell… makes this story all the more compelling by filming in the same area in which the tragic events actually took place. And cinematographer Gary Hansen uses the region’s brooding mountains, rain, and gloom to create an underlying theme of human isolation.” — Paul Silberberg, Filmmex, 1983

“When Stanley Graham was hiding out in the New Zealand bush during the war, after shooting several people he didn’t much like the look of, Lord Haw-Haw announced that Hitler had sent him a telegram: “Hold the South Island. Sending another man to take the North Island” … Graham, a backwoods farmer who caused the greatest manhunt in New Zealand history, shot people because he couldn’t make a living and he couldn’t make friends. There didn’t seem much else to do. But though that seems like fantasy, it was rooted in the film to a riveting everyday reality.” — Derek Malcolm, The Guardian

“Even the most beautiful New Zealand landscape is integrated as an almost active character. Newell’s exploitation of the night-time sequences adds a supernatural aura to Graham’s threat, which turns hunters into hunted and re-locates paranoia in the community at large; while his evocations of claustrophobia amidst open country prove well worthy of producer Andrew Brown’s intelligent screenplay.” — Paul Taylor, Time Out

“Bad Blood is based on the true story of a massive 12-day manhunt on the West Coast of the South Island. Stan Graham was born in Koiterangi (later renamed Kowhitirangi), but his Christchurch wife Dot was said to always feel an outsider. The film offers as cause for the bloodbath bad luck in hard times and community ostracism leading to the Grahams fuelling each others’ paranoia. Dot is played as the more crazed of the pair, fanning inarticulate Stan’s disappointment over the loss of his beloved guns ‘like a draft to a fire’. Tension springs from the Grahams’ unpredictability, from the role reversal when, in hunting Stan, the community become paranoid in turn, and from the sympathy that shifts in his favour as he is hunted. In excellent performances from the lead actors, Stan becomes a kind of national hero in his courageous man-alone defiance of the law while Dot remains unbowed and proud in the midst of the horror they have wrought. In powerful images, shot where the tragedy took place, the beauty and calm of sky and landscape are antithetical to the chaos about to explode. Insistent and telling motifs are tracking shots through bars and glass underlining the Grahams’ entrapment and alienation. Constant West Coast rain adds to the sense of hopelessness and the shooting scenes are brutal and messy. Local colour is provided in cameo scenes, like a kids’ footy practice, and fleshed out in painstaking production design (original photographs were used to replicate the setting and locals were brought in for advice). The narrative, enhanced by a first-class musical score, never misses a beat. New Zealand-born Andrew Brown learned of the story through a documentary by Howard Willis, who later wrote the book on which the screenplay is based. The film was produced by Southern Pictures, the then film-arm of the British company, Southern Television, to fill a tax loophole. Director Mike Newell is British. Aside from a few technicians the film unit was from New Zealand. Bad Blood, which received rave reviews in Britain and later in New Zealand.” — Helen Martin, New Zealand Film 1912-1996

Bad Blood was made for TV and screened in Britain in 1981, it was released in New Zealand in 1982.

Screenings: Bad Blood screened on 15 February 2006; as part of the Feature Restoration Project on 23 and 29 July at the New Zealand Film Festival 2006; and in a season honouring sound man Robert (Bob) Allen on 6 December 2006