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| Wake in Fright | |||
"It’s one of the quirks of screen history that it took a Canadian director, Ted Kotcheff, to give us the definitive example of Australian Gothic. Long absent from the big screen, his 1971 Wake in Fright relentlessly pursues its vision of a male chauvinist hellhole where drunkenness goes hand-in-hand with ultra-violence and sexual hysteria. The setting is outback mining town Bundayabba (known as the Yabba), a stopping place for the naive schoolteacher John Grant (Gary Bond) as he heads home to Sydney for the holidays. Enticed into conversation by a drawling old-timer (Chips Rafferty), he loses his savings in a game of two-up. From there, he sets off on a journey into his own personal heart of darkness, with his sinister new mate Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence) as his spirit guide. Though Kenneth Cook’s original 1961 potboiler was skilfully written, this material seems tailor-made for cinema — and though Kotcheff is not the most subtle of stylists, he takes full advantage of a winning hand. Character actors loom like ogres in distorted point-of-view shots, mental images punctuate the narrative like flashes of lightning and dark, cramped spaces are contrasted with desert vistas out of a spaghetti western. In the notorious kangaroo hunt climax, the Yabba emerges as a grotesque symbol for the whole of white Australia, founded on barren soil and dimly haunted by the horrors of a colonial past. In the context of international cinema, Wake in Fright can be set alongside Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) and John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) as testimony to a moment when many filmmakers clearly felt that Western civilisation was on the brink of collapse… The casting of Pleasence as the Yabba’s resident pervert turns out to be Kotcheff’s masterstroke … he’s wholly persuasive as a demonic variant of a figure beloved of Australian storytellers from Henry Lawson to David Williamson: the ratbag intellectual who stands both inside and outside a dominant male group. Giving his high, nasal voice an Australian twang, Pleasence makes Tydon a recognisable, strangely pathetic monster." – Jake Wilson, The Age "What a treat to see this remastered 1971 Australian classic that depicts a particular part of the Aussie culture so beautifully. Of course it would be true to say that 38 years after the film was made, audiences will see it quite differently … It’s a bit like living through one of David Lynch’s nightmarish dreams. Through the eyes of its ultra handsome British protagonist played by Gary Bond, we are trapped in a wild, vulgar, upside-down world in the outback where beer flows like water, money is tossed and lost gambling, women show their animalistic urges and men bond in a cloud of dust while shooting kangaroos." – Louise Keller, Urban Cinefile |
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| Australia 1971 | |||
Director: Ted Kotcheff With: Donald Pleasance (‘Doc’ Tydon), Gary Bond (John Grant), Chips Rafferty (Jock Crawford), Sylvia Kay (Janette Hynes), Jack Thompson (Dick), Peter Whittle (Joe), Al Thomas (Tim Hynes), John Meillon (Charlie), John Armstrong (Jarvis), Slim DeGrey (receptionist), Norm Erskine (Joe the cook) 114 mins, 35mm (1,85:1) R16 cert Hamilton Film Society |
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