Wake In Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971): Australia/USA

Reviewed by Zach McClellan.  Viewed at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, part of AFI Fest 2009.

Wake In Fright, also known as Outback in the United States is a thriller about a school teacher who gets stranded in a small mining town in the Outback of Australia and the drunken, violent debauchery that ensues during his stay.  When I saw this film at the AFI Fest 2009  I had no idea what was in store for me other than that the film was a thriller set in the Australian Outback and it was made in the 70s.  When the credits rolled,  I felt as if I had gotten off of a theme park ride.  The film starts off with a beautiful rotating wide shot of the vast Outback and cuts to a teacher, John Grant (Gary Bond) who sets off from Tiboonda, a small Outback town and a teaching job he dreads, since summer vacation has started and makes his way to the mining town of Bundanyabba to catch a flight to Sydney to meet his girlfriend and enjoy the summer on the beach.

Once John Grant gets to Bundanyabba or “The Yabba” as the drunk and rowdy locals call it, he goes to the local bar and meets a friendly policeman who insists that John continually drink beer with him to fit in with the rest of the locals at the bar, who by the way have been called a negative stereotype of Australians by some critics which now has its own term, Ausploitation.  It is during his time with the policeman, that we learn John is under a government contract to teach out in the Outback and would want nothing more than to get the money to buy out of his contract.  John reluctantly obliges to drink with the policeman and after a few beers goes to play the betting game Two Up, a game where he gains a winning streak.  During the Two Up sequence, I felt as if I was there in that dimly lit room with all those loud, drunk miners betting along with them.  The use of frequent cuts back and forth between all of the money being placed down and the betters shouting really drew me into the scene.  It was then further intensified with the close-ups of the two coins being tossed up towards the light hanging above.

Eventually John loses all of his money and is then stranded in “The Yabba”.  After this point, the movie continues on a drunken downward spiral.  Kotcheff uses fast cuts of different drunk miners and John drinking along with quick rotating shots to put you right in John’s shoes, right with the feeling that you’ll be stuck in that town, stuck in that bar with all those loud, dirty, uneducated men constantly forcing you to drink for eternity.  With all of his money and time spent drinking, John makes friends with some of the rowdy locals and goes on what may be one of the more brutal scenes in cinema that I have seen.  I was told after the screening by Kotcheff, himself and at the beginning of the film via a disclaimer that all of the footage was separate footage from the film, that no animals were harmed for the film, and that the footage was approved by leading animal welfare organizations in Australia and the United Kingdom.  In fact, the footage of the kangaroo’s deaths was all from documentary footage of Kotcheff’s of the miners in the Outback on a real car chase kangaroo hunt.  He recreated that real hunt in the film with the use of the car with spotlight and his actors with rifles in hand.

I will not say what happens to John after the kangaroo hunt, but afterward it was too late.  Wake In Fright had already captured me like a kangaroo;  I was right there with John almost completely without hope, lost in the desert in a drunken mania.  Kotcheff made a film that made me both laugh deeply and struck a chord in me at the same time about man’s nature in an environment unforgiving to man.  If you enjoy a thriller with comedy on the side and can move past being politically correct and the fact that men hunt kangaroos in the Outback, then you are in store for a film that I highly recommend.  Not only do I recommend this film based on its story or beautiful cinematography of the Outback and the people who live in it, but also on its message that the one man’s home is another man’s hell.