Wake in Fright
Wake in Fright (from Weird and Wonderful II: Fifty More Cult Films by George Hughes, available from freefall-productions.com on 02/11/20)
1971 / Australia / 109 minutes
“Shall I satisfy your curiosity? I’m a doctor of medicine- and an alcoholic. My disease prevented me from practising in Sydney but out here it’s scarcely noticeable.”
Director: Ted Kotcheff / Screenplay: Evan Jones, based on the novel by Kenneth Cook / Director of Photography: Brian West / Music: John Scott / Production: George Willoughby for NLT Productions / Cast: Gary Bond (John Grant), Donald Pleasence (Doc Tydon), Chips Rafferty (Jock Crawford), Sylvia Kay (Janette Hynes), Jack Thompson (Dick), John Meillon (Charlie), John Armstrong (Atkins).
John Grant (Gary Bond) is a young teacher working in the remote Australian township of Tiboonda. As the term ends and he sends his small class of mixed age students off for the Christmas (summer) holidays, John plans on heading off to Sydney to be reunited with his girlfriend and the civilisation of the city after months trapped out in the middle of nowhere.
On the way to catch his flight, John has to stop over for one night in the outback town of Bundanyabba, a mining community known as “The Yabba”. Checking into the local hotel, John soon gets bored and heads out to the pub where he first meets the police chief, Jock (Chips Rafferty, who, according to legend would neck up to thirty pints a day during this final role) and then the eccentric Doctor Tydon (an unnervingly brilliant Donald Pleasence).
Although contemptuous of outback life and the uncouth locals who he considers beneath him, John gets drunk with Jock and is introduced to the Yabba’s underground gambling craze of “Two Up”, a simple game where the players bet on heads or tails in a double coin toss. Hoping first for some holiday spending money and then to completely pay off his debts, John starts off doing well but eventually loses all his money.
Now stranded in the town and entirely reliant on the strange, predominantly male and almost universally alcoholic population’s “Aggressive hospitality”, John descends into a personal hell of drunkenness and violence as even the educated Doc Tydon explains he did before him. In the Yabba, drunken fighting, drunken hunting and general drunkenness is all there is “Out here” in the wilderness.
When Canadian director Ted Kotcheff (who a decade later would introduce the world to Rambo with First Blood) arrived in Australia in 1970 to shoot this adaptation of Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel, he got a first hand taste of outback life in a pub in Broken Hill, New South Wales (later where Mad Max 2’s post- apocalyptic landscape was filmed).
Kotcheff, a longhaired hippy type at the time, was immediately started on by a local but eventually realised that, in a town not just without women but also without brothels, the local wanted to take punches more than he wanted to throw them. This was all about getting some- any- human physical contact.
Wake in Fright never makes it clear if John Grant is actually English or if his accent is just a put- on as part of his generally superior demeanour but the late Gary Bond was in reality not only very British and very posh but also openly gay- in the outback, in the early ’70’s! However, his fish out of water disposition works perfectly for the film. The locals are continually dismayed by him- a “Clever bloke” who reads books, turns down free beer and would rather talk to the few women around than drink with the men.
Whereas some of the attitudes and customs depicted are uniquely Australian (revulsion at the idea of drinking beer that’s not freezing cold and the sudden silence in the servicemen’s club for the nightly remembrance service), others are recognisable from remote rural communities all over the world. Jock’s story about literally “Once” visiting a city (“I didn’t like it much”) is exactly the sort of casually dismissive anecdote you get from old farmers in Dorset pubs.
As Doc Tydon explains (Pleasence does do an Aussie accent), he’d be considered a disgraceful pariah in the modern cities but in the Yabba he’s not just accepted, he’s a community leader who lives entirely on the goodwill of the locals. But as unsettling as Pleasence’s performance and the character of Doc Tydon are (particularly in the scene where he’s strongly implied to have initiated a homosexual encounter with John while they were drunk), Wake in Fright’s most shocking sequence is the kangaroo hunt.
Kotcheff was uneasy about staging the hunting described in the book but was told the most ethical way to pull it off would be to film a real outback kangaroo hunt (that were happening- completely legally at the time- near the location every night anyway) then intercut it with the actors’ performances. As a result, no kangaroos were technically killed “For” Wake in Fright but it does contain real footage of them being killed. Understandably, this is still the strongest objection to the film.
In any case, despite a few strong international reviews, the film was all but buried on it’s initial release. At the time, Australian reactions were overwhelmingly negative, with most domestic commentators condemning it as the work of foreigners wanting to rubbish bush culture and present the whole country as anti- intellectual. It did better in Europe (where it went out under the alternate title, Outback) and particularly well in France but the (very) limited US release was a disaster. According to legend, it played in precisely one New York movie theatre, opening on a Sunday night during a blizzard!
During the following decades, Wake in Fright was largely forgotten and was shown only once in heavily edited form on Australian television in the ’80’s. When DVD caught on as the new home video format in the early 2000’s, no usable print of the film could be found that wasn’t severely damaged or severely cut. The original negative and sound elements were finally unearthed after a worldwide search in 2004 and, following an extensive restoration process, it was re-released theatrically to much better reception in 2009.
Thanks in large part to Martin Scorsese (one of the film’s few early admirers the first time round) and his public championing of it, Wake in Fright is now considered a classic of Aussie cinema and has lost none of it’s visceral power to shock, challenge and disturb. An updated TV adaptation of the novel was released to mixed response in 2017 but for most this quintessentially ’70’s version- with heat, dust and sweat anyone who made it through that blizzard in New York could have felt- remains definitive.
1971 / Australia / 109 minutes
“Shall I satisfy your curiosity? I’m a doctor of medicine- and an alcoholic. My disease prevented me from practising in Sydney but out here it’s scarcely noticeable.”
Director: Ted Kotcheff / Screenplay: Evan Jones, based on the novel by Kenneth Cook / Director of Photography: Brian West / Music: John Scott / Production: George Willoughby for NLT Productions / Cast: Gary Bond (John Grant), Donald Pleasence (Doc Tydon), Chips Rafferty (Jock Crawford), Sylvia Kay (Janette Hynes), Jack Thompson (Dick), John Meillon (Charlie), John Armstrong (Atkins).
John Grant (Gary Bond) is a young teacher working in the remote Australian township of Tiboonda. As the term ends and he sends his small class of mixed age students off for the Christmas (summer) holidays, John plans on heading off to Sydney to be reunited with his girlfriend and the civilisation of the city after months trapped out in the middle of nowhere.
On the way to catch his flight, John has to stop over for one night in the outback town of Bundanyabba, a mining community known as “The Yabba”. Checking into the local hotel, John soon gets bored and heads out to the pub where he first meets the police chief, Jock (Chips Rafferty, who, according to legend would neck up to thirty pints a day during this final role) and then the eccentric Doctor Tydon (an unnervingly brilliant Donald Pleasence).
Although contemptuous of outback life and the uncouth locals who he considers beneath him, John gets drunk with Jock and is introduced to the Yabba’s underground gambling craze of “Two Up”, a simple game where the players bet on heads or tails in a double coin toss. Hoping first for some holiday spending money and then to completely pay off his debts, John starts off doing well but eventually loses all his money.
Now stranded in the town and entirely reliant on the strange, predominantly male and almost universally alcoholic population’s “Aggressive hospitality”, John descends into a personal hell of drunkenness and violence as even the educated Doc Tydon explains he did before him. In the Yabba, drunken fighting, drunken hunting and general drunkenness is all there is “Out here” in the wilderness.
When Canadian director Ted Kotcheff (who a decade later would introduce the world to Rambo with First Blood) arrived in Australia in 1970 to shoot this adaptation of Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel, he got a first hand taste of outback life in a pub in Broken Hill, New South Wales (later where Mad Max 2’s post- apocalyptic landscape was filmed).
Kotcheff, a longhaired hippy type at the time, was immediately started on by a local but eventually realised that, in a town not just without women but also without brothels, the local wanted to take punches more than he wanted to throw them. This was all about getting some- any- human physical contact.
Wake in Fright never makes it clear if John Grant is actually English or if his accent is just a put- on as part of his generally superior demeanour but the late Gary Bond was in reality not only very British and very posh but also openly gay- in the outback, in the early ’70’s! However, his fish out of water disposition works perfectly for the film. The locals are continually dismayed by him- a “Clever bloke” who reads books, turns down free beer and would rather talk to the few women around than drink with the men.
Whereas some of the attitudes and customs depicted are uniquely Australian (revulsion at the idea of drinking beer that’s not freezing cold and the sudden silence in the servicemen’s club for the nightly remembrance service), others are recognisable from remote rural communities all over the world. Jock’s story about literally “Once” visiting a city (“I didn’t like it much”) is exactly the sort of casually dismissive anecdote you get from old farmers in Dorset pubs.
As Doc Tydon explains (Pleasence does do an Aussie accent), he’d be considered a disgraceful pariah in the modern cities but in the Yabba he’s not just accepted, he’s a community leader who lives entirely on the goodwill of the locals. But as unsettling as Pleasence’s performance and the character of Doc Tydon are (particularly in the scene where he’s strongly implied to have initiated a homosexual encounter with John while they were drunk), Wake in Fright’s most shocking sequence is the kangaroo hunt.
Kotcheff was uneasy about staging the hunting described in the book but was told the most ethical way to pull it off would be to film a real outback kangaroo hunt (that were happening- completely legally at the time- near the location every night anyway) then intercut it with the actors’ performances. As a result, no kangaroos were technically killed “For” Wake in Fright but it does contain real footage of them being killed. Understandably, this is still the strongest objection to the film.
In any case, despite a few strong international reviews, the film was all but buried on it’s initial release. At the time, Australian reactions were overwhelmingly negative, with most domestic commentators condemning it as the work of foreigners wanting to rubbish bush culture and present the whole country as anti- intellectual. It did better in Europe (where it went out under the alternate title, Outback) and particularly well in France but the (very) limited US release was a disaster. According to legend, it played in precisely one New York movie theatre, opening on a Sunday night during a blizzard!
During the following decades, Wake in Fright was largely forgotten and was shown only once in heavily edited form on Australian television in the ’80’s. When DVD caught on as the new home video format in the early 2000’s, no usable print of the film could be found that wasn’t severely damaged or severely cut. The original negative and sound elements were finally unearthed after a worldwide search in 2004 and, following an extensive restoration process, it was re-released theatrically to much better reception in 2009.
Thanks in large part to Martin Scorsese (one of the film’s few early admirers the first time round) and his public championing of it, Wake in Fright is now considered a classic of Aussie cinema and has lost none of it’s visceral power to shock, challenge and disturb. An updated TV adaptation of the novel was released to mixed response in 2017 but for most this quintessentially ’70’s version- with heat, dust and sweat anyone who made it through that blizzard in New York could have felt- remains definitive.
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