Wake In Fright
★★★★★
Dir: Ted Kotcheff
(1971)
Since its re-release in 2009 fans and detractors of the Australia New Wave classic Wake In Fright have been talking and talking and talking about the film. The director Ted Kotchef has been put through the ringer a few times already by an angry Australian public, the RSPCA and the American studios after the film failed to gather a good intake at the box office after the praise it was showered with in Cannes in 1971. One of the films biggest fans Martin Scorsese was ecstatic at the films rediscovery days from destruction and its restoration, stating “Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright is a deeply – and I mean deeply – unsettling and disturbing movie. I saw it when it premiered in Cannes in 1971, and it left me speechless." It certainly is a dry, dirty, tough little film; One laden with heat and dripping with an unrelenting masculinity which it threatens and ultimately succeeds in drowning its viewer and protagonist in.
Over the years the mythic qualities of the film have morphed into it being labeled, rightly, as a horror film; It's set up is certainly indebted to a western of sorts but equally as a down right horror picture. A lone traveller in a small town, populated by overly friendly, sinister people who win over a kind of forced friendship not with straight kindness at all but with never ending pints of beer and desperate promise. Kotchef introduces us to a quiet school landscape in a 360 panning shot through a red barren landscape and a quite middle class teacher named John Grant (Gary Bond). After his final day of school and a quick beer of course, he hops on a train to a larger town near the Australian outback mining landscape of Broken Hill, a fictional town affectionally called the "yabba".
His objective is to hop on a plane to Sydney where his dream girl is waiting in the surf on Bondi beach but young Grant gets trapped after attempting to win the bond on his years placement as a teacher in the outback on a game of Two-up. It's then that Wake In Fright begins to live up to its name. He's soon introduced to an alcoholic doctor (Donald Pleasance) by the chief of police (Chips Rafferty in his final role) and a bevy of local miners whose blind pride in their tiny town is thickened into a brilliant sinister creep show. "All the little devils are proud of hell" says Pleasance not 30 seconds after the pair have met in one of the many bars in the Yabba. Bond is soon lost with them in a blur of endless larger and macho pissing competitions which turn, end on end, climaxing in brilliantly edited final third which is both fascinating and seriously unsettling.
The film has drawn comparisons to Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and even to Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man in its limited screening time and they are both fitting and skewed ones. The people of the Yabba are strangely trapped there too of course, imprisoned by their own nature, upbringing and the panoramic isolation (cultural and geographical) around them; But Wake In Fright somehow goes deeper into our own savage nature more than either of those films using Bond's disapproval of the towns people as if it was our own, turning his downward spiral into something far more real and disgraceful. It's undoubtedly Kotchef's best work and easily one of the finest portrayals of the Australian personality complex than any film since.
The outback of Australia and the drinking culture of the country is rendered in searing reds and yellows, you can almost smell the beer in the air, along with the tension. In a country where every fight usually starts with the word "mate", it's a cutting and potent look at the antipodean male psyche and a staggeringly sad story about isolation, blind pride and dangerous friendships. It will certainly offend some people, especially in the harrowing kangaroo shooting scene which pivots the whole film in just 6 short minutes but it's power is as plain as the nose on your face, mate. It's a long lost masterpiece.
