Credit where it’s due: before his extended, tequila-fueled sunset, Mel Gibson was a spunk.

Showing off his shirtless and occasionally fully-nude appeals in Australian hits like Mad Max, Gallipoli and Tim (where he played a blue-collar simpleton who initiates an affair with much-older Piper Laurie and wears skin tight King Gee work shorts and matching tank tops - see clip after the jump) he then segued into major Hollywood fame via dramas such as The Year Of Living Dangerously, The River, Mrs Soffel and of course, the Lethal Weapon series.

It was all quickly downhill from there, reaching an unforgiveable nadir when he was handed two Oscars for directing and producing the worst-ever Best Picture Oscar winner, whose title I won’t mention here.

But before that, he was sweaty and sultry, even if his Schweppervescent Aussie twang did sometimes grate (now heavily LA-inflected, it certainly still does). Possibly at his best (looking) in The Year Of Living Dangerously, where he wore cheesecloth shirts unbuttoned to the waist and perpetually sweated in the Indonesian humidity, he shows us why it was probably a good thing, in a way, that Joey Stefano died young - for some reason, their brand of swaggery, macho beauty doesn’t tend to age well, does it?