An edited extract from ‘Alvin Purple’, Australian Screen Classics, (Currency Press, $16.95) by Catharine Lumby, appeared in today’s Australian. It will be published on June 26 as part of the  series.

Lumby sees Alvin Purple as a mirror on our past, a time capsule of Australian culture in the early 1970s, and as an important part of the nation’s film history …

“Watching it was like opening a time capsule. It was all there, everything I remember living through and sensing: the nudge-nudge humour, the anxiety about where female sexual desire fits into heterosexuality, the electricity of burgeoning cultural and political change. With the benefit of hindsight, it struck me that Alvin Purple is a film that not only has a central place in Australian film culture, it’s an important cultural text. It reflects and refracts so many of the cultural, political and sexual anxieties and realities of its time. It’s an important film.”

Another option for teaching “social values” next semester, or next year perhaps. I’ll have to watch it again over the fast-approaching term break.

JK