Wake in Fright (1971)
Directed by: Ted Kotcheff.
Written by: Evan Jones based on the
novel by Kenneth Cook.
Starring: Gary Bond (John Grant), Donald
Pleasence (Doc Tydon), Chips Rafferty (Jock Crawford), Sylvia Kay (Janette
Hynes), Jack Thompson (Dick), Peter Whittle (Joe), Al Thomas (Tim Hynes), John
Meillon (Charlie), John Armstrong (Atkins), Slim DeGrey (Jarvis).
Sometimes
a movie is too much of its time and place to be properly viewed upon its initial
release. Such seems to be the case with Wake in Fright – a 1971 Australian film
that got very good reviews at the time – and even a slot in the official
selection in that year’s Cannes Film Festival – that nevertheless tanked at the
box office, and spent the next 40 years in obscurity – as it was considered a
lost film. The film’s editor, Anthony Buckley, started searching for a print
good enough to restore in 1994 – and it took him 10 years to find one – in
Pittsburgh of all places, in a box labeled “For Destruction”. The film was
restored and re-released in 2012 – where it has since taken its place among the
greatest Australian films ever made.
It
is perhaps easy to see why Australian audiences didn’t want to see the film back
in 1971. It takes the stereotype of Australian manly men – those hard drinking,
fun loving guys, and looks at the darkness underneath all of that. Its story of
a teacher, John Grant (Gary Bond), who has to teach at a remote, Outback school
– in order to get licensed to teacher at all, you have to pay a $1,000 bond –
which guarantees you’ll stick out your contract no matter what remote wasteland
they assign you to. It’s the Christmas break, and John is looking forward to
going to Sydney to see his girlfriend – a blonde, surfer girl bombshell, we see
in his mind’s eye. But first, he has to take a train to Bundanyabba – known to
the locals as The Yabba – and spend the night, waiting for his flight to
Sydney. He goes to a bar, where he meets the local police chief – Jock Crawford
(Chips Rafferty), who like everyone else John will meet in the Yabba,
encourages him to drink another beer, then another beer, then another, etc. He
also introduces John to “two up” – a gambling game in the bar’s backroom – it’s
a simple enough game – a flipper flips two quarters and everyone bets on
whether they’ll heads or tails (one of each is a do over). In classic movie
tradition John wins and wins at this game – until he loses. And when he loses,
he loses everything. Now, he’s stuck in The Yabba, with no way to get anywhere.
Luckily, everyone in town is so friendly. He first meets Tim Hynes (Al Thomas)
in a bar – who invites him back to his place for more booze. It’s there he
meets Tim’s daughter Janette (Sylvia Kay) – who beautiful, and seemingly
constantly pissed off. Eventually, he fall in with a crowd led by Doc Tydon
(Donald Pleasence) – who will push John to become more of a man.
Wake
in Fright was made in the same year as Sam Peckinpah’s much more famous film,
Straw Dogs – where Dustin Hoffman plays an American physics professor, who
accompanies his wife to her remote, English hometown – and has to learn how to
be a man – which he does through violence. Wake in Fright does something
similar – but in a more subtle way. The men in Straw Dogs – the ones who knew
his wife before, and want to know her again (which, depending on your
interpretation of a key scene, she either does or does not respond to)- are
clearly violent thugs from the beginning. But while Doc Tydon is kind of creepy
from the moment we meet him – Pleasence has that way about him as an actor,
making every role he does even creepier than it otherwise would be – they seem
like nice guys at first. All they’re doing, after all, is drinking and having
fun. They don’t even care that John has no money – he’s one of them now, and
they accept and encourage him – as John gets pushed further and further in
doing things he otherwise would never do. This culminates in the sequence that
has made Wake in Fright famous – and controversial – as the men drag John along
with them on a kangaroo hunt. The sequence is brutal and unflinching – director
Ted Kotcheff and the crew accompanied a real kangaroo hunt, and filmed it,
meaning the bloody animals in pain you see in the film are real.
Director
Kotcheff has defended his use of this footage – saying that he only used the
mildest of footage he shot (and that most of what he did shoot was far too
graphic to show). He himself is a vegetarian, and The Royal Australian Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals urged him to use the footage in the
film, to show the world just exactly was being done to kangaroos in these
nightly hunts. The footage, then, serves two purposes. It is a brilliant
depiction of just how far this mild mannered school teacher had fallen by that
point – that this man who is uncomfortable with a gun at first, not only allows
himself to be brought along on this hunt, but that he becomes an active
participant in it, and does truly horrific things in it. It also shows just
what is being done to kangaroos – which like other horrific footage (like in
various films that show the inner workings of a slaughterhouse) – those of whom
who eat meat (or, in the case of kangaroos, buy pet food that includes their
meat), at least need to be aware of.
All
of this is powerful stuff in Wake in Fright – but I think the reason why the
film is truly great, comes after that kangaroo hunt – when the film makes
explicit the homoerotic tension that had been running through the film for
almost the entirety of its running time, with an encounter between Doc and
John. There is often this tension in these “manly” movies – I mentioned it
recently when talking about Captain America: Civil War – but few films actually
explicitly acknowledge it. You could criticize the film as being homophobic if
you wanted to – John’s reaction to what happens with Doc clearly indicates his
disgust with it – but I don’t read the film that way. There’s something deeper
at play here.
The
end of the film is intriguing – as John returns to his normal life at that
remote Outback school, and has a short conversation with the local bartender we
saw briefly at the beginning. What is that look on the bartender’s face? Why is
he smiling? I’m not quite sure, but I am sure, I won’t forget that look – or
most of what led up to it. Wake in Fright is a film that very much of its time
and place – I think it made people uncomfortable when it came out – and perhaps
with some distance now, they can see it more clearly. And yet, I think you
could pretty much make the same film today – and it would be just as relevant.
Some things, I guess, never change.
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