Hogan’s Heroes STAR IMAGE IN DEAN MURPHY’S THE VERY EXCELLENT MR. DUNDEE
‘Why don’t we just turn around and go back the way we came up?’ the eighty-year-old Paul Hogan, playing himself, asks at the outset of The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee (2020). In one of writer-director Dean Murphy’s wittier touches, the image that accompanies this plainly reflexive line suggests a visual pun on the phrase ‘over the hill’ – the hill in question being one of the Hollywood Hills, where Hogan has gone for a stroll with his mate Barney (Roy Billing). At present, the pair are wondering how to proceed, having just caught wind of a dangerous snake nearby.
Hogan’s most famous fictional alter ego, Northern Territory crocodile hunter Mick Dundee, would know exactly what to do. This is less true of the Hogan of Mr. Dundee, a fictional construct in his own right but one who bears a much closer resemblance to his real-world model. Like the man who plays him, this Hogan is a celebrated Australian comic and movie star, long past his Hollywood heyday but still living in Los Angeles – in theory, so he can stay close to his twenty-year-old son, Chase (Jacob Elordi), who is evidently modelled on the real-life Hogan’s own youngest son, Chance.1
Given the gap between Mick the outback legend and Paul the city boy, why should Hogan be expected to show any knack for bushcraft in his own person? ‘Because everyone’s watching,’ Barney explains – which sounds a little optimistic if the line is taken to refer to the film that has just started, especially under circumstances that ruled out the original plan for cinematic release. Within the fiction, however, a small crowd has indeed gathered, including a group of
