Coleby is distracted and concerned about an exciting career opportunity, Morris is currently working at home engrossed in her studies of New Guinea culture, and is timid and less confident socially than her husband. Morris and Coleby play married academics. All three are excellent here in what could be their best work. The three main actors (Judy Morris, Ivor Kants and Robert Coleby) aren't exactly household names here in Australia but will be familiar to most TV viewers over the age of 30 for their roles in various soap operas and the like. This obscure Peter Weir TV movie from the late 1970s is a little dated, but still very entertaining and suspenseful. Not to be missed under any circumstances. It was not until it was shown on television however that the "legend" of this great little movie was founded and its popularity mushroomed. What it actually shows is that just sometimes, fighting fire with fire works! THE PLUMBER was filmed in Adelaide and originally received limited theatrical release. Some viewers regard the end as "soft" if not a total cop-out. After Morris has hit rock-bottom and realises that fear is the key, she devises a way to get back at him. By degrees, the bathroom is totally destroyed as Max works to compensate for that social-class chip on his shoulder, the size of a Redwood! The scene of the dinner party wherein an overseas guest is trapped under collapsed rubble in the bathroom is a hoot. While the situations thrown up are critically funny at times (Kants gives his greatest performance here) an air of extreme unease pervades proceedings. Jill, a highly educated anthropologist, married to a doctor and studying indigenous behavioural activity has absolutely no idea how to respond to this intrusive workman who stops for 10 minute tea-breaks every five minutes and composes a rock-song for which he asks her considered opinion. Less of a thriller and more a black comedy, Weir places his protaganists each in unfamilar locales. In the bathroom however he rules unchallenged and Jill finds herself at the mercy of what appears to be a serially disturbed tradesman. Whether Max has multiple pre-emptive social issues to deal with or simply reacts later to her upper-class dismissive treatment of his blue-collar status is not made clear. A bush-walk that defies explanation at HANGING ROCK, a country town with a lurid secret in THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS, oveflowing domestic storm-water in THE LAST WAVE and here, the humble PLUMBER, or maybe the stranger from Hell? Filmed for the most part in Jill Cowper's (Judy Morris's) apartment, if not the bathroom itself, her nightmare starts when she has need to call a tradesman to fix faulty plumbing in her bathroom. Weir has such a great talent for drawing out the extraordinary from the most ordinary of scenarios. Proof indeed that you do not need big budgets to make celluloid winners. What a straight-up quirky little gem from Peter Weir.
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