Genre:
Drama, World Cinema, Cult
Distributor:
Eureka! Video
Rating:18
DVD/BD Release Date:
31st March 2014 (UK)
Director:
Ted Kotcheff
Cast:
Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond, Chips Rafferty
Buy:Wake in Fright (Masters of Cinema) (Dual Format Edition) [Blu-ray + DVD] [1971]
Wake in Fright is considered by many to be the great lost Australian film and it’s not hard to see why. It was considered pretty lost since its release in 1971; there was a print in Dublin but the quality was too poor for a home video release. The film’s editor Anthony Buckley has been searching for it for years and eventually his persistence paid off when he found one in Pittsburgh which had the negative. Buckley was extremely lucky he found it when he did because it was marked for destruction.
The film is an extremely grim view of the Australian outback (it was called Outback in some territories), and it’s about a school teacher John Grant (Gary Bond) who is having his Christmas holidays and has to stay in mining town for the night. The locals are almost all hard-drinking gambling men and he looses all his money in a simple head and tails game. He must rely on the charity of the locals, but as the film progresses he enters deeper and deeper into a heart of darkness.
The film is notorious for a kangaroo-hunting scene, in which the length John Grant would go to are apparent. Donald Pleasance gives his finest performances as a local who is the most depraved of the bunch. The town is inspired by many outback towns where the ratio of men to women are 3 to 1 and the men just fight and drink in order to get their kicks, although there is a homoerotic aspect to the story especially with what happens towards the film’s end.
Ted Kotcheff directed the film who has had one of the strangest careers ever; he would later go on to direct the fantastic First Blood and then Weekend at Bernies. It was originally considered a project for Josey Losey and Dirk Bogarde of The Servant fame, which would have been a very different film but equally fascinating. Its cinematography is outstanding, but with such a photogenic landscape like the Australian outback, it’s not hard to film something beautiful despite all the ugliness on scene.
Wake in Fright was very controversial in Australia because some of the audience didn’t believe it represented Australians correctly and the others believed it was an extremely actuate depiction. Nick Cave called it “The best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence” and Martin Scorsese is also a notable fan. The film is a terrifying portrayal of how evil man can be, and luckily - due to the National Film and Sound Archive of Australian and Eureka Video, it’s been rediscovered.
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