Graeme Blundell & Alvin Purple

A huge influence in Australian cinema during the 1970's, Graeme Blundell was a driving force in many of Tim Burstall's films, and continued to be a figure in Burstall's career and life, both men being associated with 1970's Australian film.

Blundell is an iconic Australian actor due to his character in Burstall's film Alvin Purple playing the sex-crazed Alvin. Alvin Purple is considered to be successful due to it's commercial value, being a film generally about sex and human's desire for sex, Alvin Purple was also extremely risque for the time, and reflected the lives, thoughts and the changing culture during the 1970's. Alvin Purple connected with audiences also because Blundell's realistic performance as a real teenager with real issues and real thoughts and feelings about his sexual desires; something many teenagers of the day, even still today can connect with.

In Blundell's biography 'The Naked Truth: A life in parts'  he writes that the world after the 1960's explored a huge market for sex, and Alvin fit into that market. The exciting idea about Alvin was that sex was treated in a way that audiences accepted it as a script "...that scored it's points with a wink rather than a sneer, and a smile rather than a leer".

Alvin Purple managed to get audiences to accept the film as a charming comedy about sex, and a man's ideas and hesitance about it, while it was "raunchy" for it's time, the film projected societies anxieties about sex rather than blatantly placing it on film for 'shock value'. Blundell and Alvin are forever remembered together, and were used as a tool in the 1970's to bring to light the new fascinating culture surrounding Australian cinema and the new ideas people were accepting as every day life from the stubborn and clean earlier years.