By Julian Shaw
Worth: $20.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Gary Bond, Donald Pleasance, Jack Thompson, Chips Rafferty, Sylvia Kay, Peter Whittle, Slim DeGrey, John Meillon
Intro:
…don’t miss this one on the big screen.
The best Australian film showing on silver screens this year won’t be one that has been produced in the past twelve months. Instead, it will be this ball-tearing, long unseen masterpiece from 1971. The helmer behind this notorious outback epic is Canadian Ted Kotcheff, the director of, amongst others, First Blood. Far from embracing the loveable larrikin personas that have polluted our screens for decades, this woozy, nightmarish vision of our culture at its lowest ebb peals off devastating footnotes on the deeply hypocritical, leave-your-brain behind rite passages of Australian manhood. Blissfully free of the jingoism and sentimentality that can undo even the most gifted filmmaker when they swing their telephoto lens at the homeland, Kotcheff fashioned a probing, uncomfortably intense essay of Antipodean bad manners in the heightened tones of a Dadaist fever dream. The humour is rich, and the laugh-out-loud moments trickle freely, but always in deeply thorned and trenchant ways.
What makes Wake in Fright work beautifully though, and halts any chance of the themes becoming one-dimensional, is that it doesn’t merely demonise boorish Australianness, but also satirises the spiritual brittleness of a British gentleman who makes a doomed odyssey through the flies, litres of piss-warm beer, and blood tracks of the Aussie desert. Indeed, the first clue that the director might be a foreigner is that the protagonist – something of a proxy for the helmer, you can’t help but feel – is a suave teacher abroad. John Grant (an immaculate Gary Bond, with a bleached coif, coolly calculating eyes and lilied English brogue) is a bonded school tutor who is marooned in The Yabba, a micro-community whose readily apparent limitations are perfectly encapsulated by the film’s tagline: “Have a drink, mate? Have a fight, mate? Have some dust and sweat, mate? There’s nothing else out here…”
When we first see Grant, he is in a tense stare-down with a cast of kids dying to get out of their sweltering classroom and into the sunshine – little do we know at this point that Grant is perhaps more eager than them for the school year to wrap up. After a mindless, booze-fuelled gambling spree, Grant finds himself with a dollar to his name, indefinitely stranded in the desert, and with Sydney – let alone London – impossibly far away. The local community picks him up and dusts him off with the proverbial “she’ll be right, mate” wink and nudge, but there is nothing but spiritual desolation on offer when Grant strikes up a temporary friendship with Doc Tydon (an unforgettable Donald Pleasance). Per his Christian name, Tydon is indeed a doctor who has forsaken his career for a rusted-over sand shack, so that he might booze himself at all hours of the day, answering to no-one. With not a single card up his sleeve to play, Grant gets hauled into a world of beer sculling, hunting and bleary-eyed “mateship” led by the nihilistic Doc, that will ultimately tear his soul apart.
Though Wake in Fright stunned audiences when first released, what’s exhilarating is that it still packs a mighty thump to the solar plexus decades after being created. The nighttime kangaroo-hunting sequence will still leave jaws agape, not just because of its images of casual killing (attained during real kangaroo culling season), but because of the savagely syncopated editing and dizzying sonic flights. There are other subtler delights to be had for mature audiences, including the sight of local icon Jack Thompson, as outback wrangler Dick, in his first major film role.
Despite screening at the Cannes Film Festival on its initial release, and gaining pupil-widening responses from foreign audiences under the title Outback, Wake in Fright initially just couldn’t garner traction at home, seemingly averting eyes every step of the way. In the decades since its release, however, the film has been recognised for the vital cultural artefact that it truly is, even copping the televisual remake treatment in 2017. This stunning 4K restoration is especially beautiful for the reason that it never tarnishes the film’s original raw palette. It’s evidently all “still there” – the saturated colour scheme, and the burnt-out and fly-flecked vistas, as well as a dense film grain that resembles the wide-open pores of an aged face. If you’re a fan of Australian cinema, don’t miss this one on the big screen.
