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

Reviewed by Guy Dolev. Viewed at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, AFI Film Festival 2009, Hollywood, California.

Being one of only two films ever that have been screened twice at the Cannes Film Festival -the other being Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura– Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 feature Wake in Fright was screened at the AFI Film Festival 2009 to coincide with the DVD and Blu-ray Disc release on November 4th, 2009. Due to studio bankruptcy and the original print being carelessly passed between banking companies, ultimately stuffed into an obscure storage location and miraculously discovered by an associate of the director, this 1970s film is being shown at festivals because it was once regarded as having been lost, then forgotten, yet finally resurfaced and the print painstakingly restored with digital processing.

Adapted from Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel, the film takes us on an absolutely sinful adventure where the perfectly desolate Australian outback is shown to have devilish secrets lying just beneath the surface. A handsome and youthful schoolteacher, John Grant (Gary Bond), sets his schoolchildren free at end of the semester, the start of the summer in the isolated region of Tiboonda. With dreamy plans of visiting his girlfriend in Sydney and spending a romantic time with her on the beach, he heads to a mining town, known as the Yabba, in order to take a flight out the next day. However, the locals, namely a sheriff, Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty), draw the cleanly dressed, sophisticated young man into their depraved lifestyle of pouring down beer and gambling on a game called two-up, which John takes to be a good opportunity at making some quick cash off the sweaty, belligerently intoxicated miners. Though he comes up briefly, expecting to be able to free himself from the chains’ constraint of his profession, his downfall is that he cannot quit the game after the fleeting success he enjoys, which leaves him penniless. With nowhere to sleep or eat, he is reduced to looking for work on the labor line, though he consistently puts this off in order to be friendly and drink with the Yabba’s drinking community.

Mixed into his adventures, John encounters a handful of local-types that are more than happy to have a new friend to corrupt. Though they don’t accept him at first, partly for his slightly haughty air of being, and his attempt to seduce an attractive young woman rather than to drink with them, he is soon staying with a local, alcoholic who reveals himself to be an educated man and a doctor, ‘Doc’ Tydon (Donald Pleasence). In order to prove himself, John finds himself drinking constantly to keep up with his new companions and having wild adventures in the Outback, culminating in a brutal kangaroo hunt.

At the screening, the director explained that the kangaroos shot in the film weren’t killed for the sake of the film, though their deaths are very real; it was explained that the director was shocked by the practice of hunting these animals, which was a lucrative business funded chiefly by the United States, as the kangaroos were turned into pet food, so while shooting this feature film, he also was able to travel with a group of professional kangaroo hunters to create a documentary about their work, believing that it was a subject worth of serious attention and criminally overlooked by the rest of the world.

The film does so much to represent rural life in an area of which most have absolutely no knowledge of its interested, yet morally depraved underside. With its hallucinatory and paranoid images of John’s distorted perception, we are taken into an undesirable and caustic world, filled with wicked creatures like the surrealist paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. With its shocking climax, uproarious black humor, quick pace, startling imagery and very awkward sexual encounters, including one in which John and the Doc, after a violent night of drinking, retire to an implied homosexual romance in the doctor’s filthy shack, I cannot recommend this film highly enough. Truly, it inspired the work of some of Australia’s most significant filmmakers, such as Peter Weir, with whom Kotcheff had collaborated at a time and his profound contribution to the thriller film. Showing the nature of Australia’s uncivilized types and their wild, barbarian antics, the film forces an understanding of life in the mysterious Outback.