Director: Ted Kotcheff
Starring: John Grant, Donald Pleasence, Chips Rafferty, Sylvia Kay, Jack Thompson, Peter Whittle, Al Thomas
Mid-semester break is over and I'm back to Introduction to Cinema. We're starting a spell of a few weeks on Australian cinema by looking at Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright. I was quite pleased to see that it was on the viewing list for this course because I was actually given a copy of the newly remastered DVD for Christmas last year.
John Grant (Bond) is a well educated school teacher from Sydney. "A bonded slave of the educated department" he has to serve out a tenure in the tiny outback town of Tiboonda unless he can pay the $1000 bond required to enable him to go where he chooses. When school breaks for Christmas, John heads for Sydney to see his girlfriend, but with his plane not leaving until the morning he has to spend the evening in the regional town Bundanyabba. When he visits the RSL that evening looking for a meal and a drink he is taken under the wing of a friendly local policemen, Jock Crawford (Rafferty) who, among other things, teaches him how to play Two Up. After a couple of lucky spins John is within reach of the $1000 which will mean he never has to return to Tiboonda. But he goes one spin too many and ends up losing everything. Thus he is stranded in Bundanyabba for the summer, relying on the hospitality of the locals who seem all to willing to oblige him, provided he is happy to have a drink with them. The snooty John quickly descends into a haze of booze and violence.
Despite being considered one of the landmarks of Australian film history it took a long time for Wake in Fright to get a DVD release. This is due to the fact that for a number of years this film was effectively lost. The only known print of the film was located in Dublin and was deemed to be of insufficient quality to warrant a transfer to DVD. In 1996 the film's editor, Anthony Buckley, commenced an international search for the negative of Wake in Fright. It was eventually established that British company Lancair held a copy. The only problem was they had gone into liquidation and all of their stock had been sent to Pittsburgh, to a company called Eyemark Entertainment. After initial contact with Eyemark, the trail went cold until 2000 when it was discovered that Eyemark had become King World Productions, a subsidiary of CBS. Finally, over 200 cans of negative, triseparations and music tracks were found in a container dump bin marked "for destruction" in the Pittsburgh warehouse, salvaged just in time. In 2004, after eight years of work, the negative for Wake in Fright arrived at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra and work was begun on the restoration. The completed restoration was screened for the first time at the 2009 Sydney Film Festival and went on to be screened at Cannes later that year screened at the Cannes Film Festival, 38 years after it originally appeared there and had received a nomination for the Palme d'Or.
I really didn't know what to expect from this film. I hadn't heard a great deal about it and was unaware of the plot of the story. Based on the title, which the novel's author Kenneth Cook derived from the old curse "May you dream of the devil and wake in fright," I figured it would be a horror of some sort, and it is, but not in the way you expect it to be. The film maintains an air of menace despite the outward appearance of friendly hospitality (as John quickly discovers the invitation to have a drink is more of an order than a request), as well as a strange sense of claustrophobia in a town which is surrounded by nothing but wide open spaces.
While Wake in Fright is renowned as an Australian classic, just how much this is an Australian film is questionable. Yes the film was based on an Australian novel and was filmed on location in Broken Hill, but the director, Ted Kotcheff of First Blood and Weekend at Bernie's fame, was Canadian, the screenplay was written by a Jamaican born Briton, the producer was Norwegian, the two principal actors were British and the production was financed by EMI, a British company. But to me this international creative team seems key to the creation of the outsiders viewpoint of the outback and the Australian culture. Often when we watch films set in the outback we are encouraged to identify with the locals, to feel at home there. Wake in Fright takes a side of Australian culture that we are used to seeing celebrated in films; the inclusive, having a beer with a mate, he's a good bloke, kind of thing, and gives it a sense of menace, treating it with the suspicion of an outsider. One reviewer called Wake in Fright, "the strongest and most savage comment on Australia ever put on film." It's a fair call.
The film famously contains quite a confronting scene of a kangaroo shoot which is not for the squeamish or the animal lover. The scene uses real and graphic footage of kangaroos being shot and dying. There is a disclaimer at the end of the movie which assures the viewer that these animals were not killed specifically for the movie but the footage was taken on a government licensed cull undertaken by professional hunters. Personally, more so than the footage of the kangaroos being shot, I found the footage in the same scene of Joe (Whittle) wrestling with and taunting a wounded kangaroo before slitting it's throat with a knife much more confronting. This kangaroo was credited as 'Nelson - the fighting kangaroo', so I can only assume that it was a performing animal and therefore wasn't actually killed, but either way the taunting of an animal like that doesn't sit well today.
The film is a notable marker in the history of the Australian cinema as not only is it the screen debut of Jack Thompson, but it is also the final screen appearance of legendary Australian character actor Chips Rafferty, who died only a matter of weeks after the film was completed.
Wake in Fright is truly unlike any screen representation of Australian culture that I have seen. It shines a spotlight on an ugly side of the outback existence which is so often celebrated in our national cinema. This film is quite confronting at times, both in terms of what you see on screen and in terms of the comment it is making, and is generally not for everyone but it is a very interesting contrast to the vast majority of outback Australian films.
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