Filmed on-location in Broken Hill and Sydney, Wake in Fright was an international co-production between Australia, Britain,[10] and the United States.[11][12] Alongside Walkabout, it was one of two Australian films to be nominated for the Grand Prix du Festival at the 24th Cannes Film Festival. Despite attracting positive reviews at the time, the film was a commercial failure in Australia, in part due to scant marketing by United Artists, as well as controversy surrounding its portrayal of outback life, including a hunting scene in which real kangaroos are shot and killed.
By the 1990s, Wake in Fright had developed a cult reputation as Australia's great "lost film" because its master negative had gone missing, resulting in censored prints of degraded quality being used for its few television broadcasts and VHS releases. After the original film and sound elements were rescued by editor Anthony Buckley in 2004, the film was digitally remastered and given a 2009 re-release at Cannes and in Australian theatres to widespread acclaim; it was issued commercially on DVD and Blu-ray later that year. Wake in Fright is now considered a pivotal film of both the Australian New Wave[13] and the Ozploitation cycle,[14] earning praise from contemporary critics for Kotcheff's direction and the cast's performances.[15]
John Grant is a young, middle-class schoolteacher who feels disgruntled because of the onerous terms of a financial bond that he signed with the government in return for receiving a tertiary education. The bond has forced him to accept a two-year post at a tiny school at Tiboonda, a remote township in the arid outback. It is the start of the Christmas holidays, and John plans on going to Sydney to see his girlfriend Robyn, but first he must travel by train to the nearby mining town of Bundanyabba – affectionately nicknamed "The Yabba" by the locals – in order to catch a Sydney-bound flight.
Upon arriving at The Yabba, John goes to a pub. There he meets the local policeman, Jock Crawford, who befriends him after both drink repeated glasses of beer, first at the pub and then at an RSL club, where they witness an unnerving ANZAC memorial service. Crawford then introduces him to the illegal game of two-up, and to Clarence "Doc" Tydon, a vagrant, alcoholic medical practitioner who questions John's contemptuous view of The Yabba and its populace. Deciding to try his luck at two-up, John has a winning streak but becomes reckless: in a desperate bid to win enough money to pay off his bond, he loses all of his cash in two rounds. This results in John becoming stranded in The Yabba with no money, leaving him at the mercy of its searing heat and eccentric but sinister townsfolk.
While drinking, John becomes friends with a resident named Tim Hynes and goes to Tim's house, where he meets his adult daughter, Janette, and his two friends, miners Dick and Joe. Tim, Dick and Joe engage in an all-day drinking session, where they are eventually joined by Doc. John converses with Janette, who quietly desires a life outside of waiting on her father and his friends. She aggressively tries to seduce John, who vomits partly in disgust and due to the beer he has ingested.
After engaging in more debauched rituals with the Hynes and their guests, John finds refuge in Doc's isolated shack. After providing him with medicine to cure his hangover and feeding him on kangaroo meat, Doc expounds his worldview onto John, revealing that his alcoholism and self-sufficient attitude to life prevented him from practicing in Sydney. He also reveals that he and Janette have had a long-standing open relationship punctuated by unorthodox sexual encounters.
John and Doc are joined by Dick and Joe in a drunken, barbaric kangaroo hunt that lasts into the night, which culminates in Joe engaging in fisticuffs with one such kangaroo and John clumsily stabbing another to death. The four then vandalize a bush pub, where Dick and Joe engage in a playful fight that turns brutal, interrupting Doc as he lectures an unconscious John about the violent nature of civilization despite its philosophical and materialistic trappings. At dawn, John returns to Doc's shack, where Doc initiates a homosexual encounter between the two.[16]
Repulsed, John leaves that morning and returns to town, where his two suitcases, left behind at a hotel after he met Tim, are returned to him by Crawford. After discarding one suitcase – mostly containing textbooks, including one on Plato – he wanders through the desert towards Sydney, hitch-hiking with truck drivers where possible and procuring food using the rifle he was given during the hunt. He eventually arrives at a truck stop, where he persuades a driver he assumes is heading for Sydney to give him a lift. However, due to miscommunication, John returns to The Yabba instead.
Enraged with Doc and his perversity, John rushes to his empty cabin, intent on shooting him upon his return. However, he becomes overwhelmed with loneliness and remorse, and turns his rifle on himself. Doc arrives to witness John shoot himself in the temple, the impact of which scars but fails to kill him. John recovers in the hospital and signs a statement from Crawford explaining that his suicide attempt was an accident. Several weeks later, Doc takes him to the railway station, where they quietly make peace with each other. No longer contemptuous of the outback's inhabitants and more assured of himself, John returns to Tiboonda to begin the new school year.
Bundanyabba is a "thinly disguised portrait" of Broken Hill, where much of the film was shot.
A film adaptation of Kenneth Cook's 1961 novel Wake in Fright was linked with the actor Dirk Bogarde and director Joseph Losey as early as 1963.[19][20]Morris West later secured the film rights and tried, unsuccessfully, to raise funding for the film's production.[12] The rights were eventually bought by Australian company NLT Productions and American firm Group W Films and Canadian director Ted Kotcheff was recruited to direct the film. As stated by writer Stephen Vagg, "the first masterpiece of the revived Australian film industry" was "directed by a Canadian, from a script by a Jamaican, with a Norwegian producer and finance from an American fridge manufacturer."[21]
After Wake in Fright, Kotcheff would continue to have a successful career as a director. His later films included The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1973), Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), First Blood (1982) and Weekend at Bernie's (1988).[22]Robert Helpmann was initially hired to play the role of Doc Tydon, but he was replaced with Donald Pleasence due to scheduling conflicts.[12] Actor Michael York stated in a 1980 interview that he turned down a role in the film due to being offended by the kangaroo hunting scene.[12]
The shooting of Wake in Fright began in January 1970 in the mining town of Broken Hill, (the area which had inspired Cook for the setting of his novel), with interiors shot the next month at Ajax Studios in the Sydney beach-side suburb of Bondi. It was the last film to feature the veteran character actor Chips Rafferty, who died of a heart attack prior to Wake in Fright's release, and the first film with Jack Thompson, a future Australian cinema star, among its cast members.[12]
Film copyright issue
In 2018, a copyright dispute arose after Debbie Limb claimed she owned half of the film rights, as her father, Bobby Limb, co-owned the film's production company NLT Productions. However, there was no existing documentation of a legal contract. It had been stipulated that revenue earned from the film be put into a trust fund to support the Australian film industry.[23]
Release
The world premiere of Wake in Fright (as Outback) occurred on opening night of the 1971 Cannes Film Festival on 13 May.[2] Ted Kotcheff was nominated for a Golden Palm Award.[24] Internationally, the film opened commercially in the United Kingdom on 29 October 1971 and the United States on 20 February 1972.[7]
When the film was re-released in Australia on 25 June 2009, it grossed $62,393 in its opening weekend,[25] and eventually earned $321,323.[8] The film made $50,394 during a 2012 re-release in the United States.[9] It was also screened in Japan, among other revival markets.
Reception
Wake in Fright found a favourable public response in France, where it ran for five months, and in the United Kingdom. However, despite receiving such critical support at Cannes and in Australia, Wake in Fright suffered poor domestic box-office returns. Although there were complaints that the film's distributor, United Artists, had failed to promote the film successfully, it was also thought that the film was "perhaps too uncomfortably direct and uncompromising to draw large Australian audiences".[26] During an early Australian screening, one man stood up, pointed at the screen and protested "That's not us!", to which Jack Thompson yelled back "Sit down, mate. It is us."[27]
In his 1972 review for The New York Times, Roger Greenspun praised the film for its atmosphere "of general foreboding that crystalizes often enough into particular terror and that is not quite like anything else I can remember feeling at the movies. Certain science-fiction films come closest to it, especially those in which some evil alien presence has taken over a community that to all outward appearances remains normal—with only the slightest most fugitive hint that something somehow is hideously wrong"; he also admitted to finding the memorial service at the RSL club to be more disturbing than the kangaroo hunting sequences, and praised the performances of the cast, particularly Kay and Thomas.[28] A review of the Cannes premiere in Variety called it "a creditable effort" from the Australian film industry, "even allowing for the fact that key technical and acting credits are British. The end result is a forceful glimpse of little-known territory in which the emphasis is on booze and violence, with a touch of sex for good measure."[29] Gillian Hanson of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "Canadian director Ted Kotcheff has captured the mindless brutality of life in the outback with extraordinary felicity ... Yet, despite its unmistakable competence, the film's bite is blunted by the script's shallow and largely unmotivated characterisation of John Grant, and by the loosely-knit and over-melodramatic story line which never achieves thematic coherence."[30]
The unrestored version of Wake in Fright received a three stars (out of four) rating from the American film reviewer Leonard Maltin in his 2006 Movie Guide, while Brian McFarlane, writing in 1999 in The Oxford Companion to Australian Film, said that it was "almost uniquely unsettling in the history of new Australian Cinema". Askmen.com echoed these sentiments, citing that "it's not hard to see why the dusty savagery and clown-faced surrealism of Ted Kotcheff's fourth feature was never shown on telly at the time."[31]
Following the film's restoration, Wake in Fright screened at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival on 15 May 2009 when it was selected as a Cannes Classic title by the head of the department, Martin Scorsese.[32]Wake in Fright is one of only two films ever to screen twice in the history of the festival.[33] Scorsese said, "Wake in Fright is a deeply -- and I mean deeply -- unsettling and disturbing movie. I saw it when it premiered at Cannes in 1971, and it left me speechless. Visually, dramatically, atmospherically and psychologically, it's beautifully calibrated and it gets under your skin one encounter at a time, right along with the protagonist played by Gary Bond. I'm excited that Wake in Fright has been preserved and restored and that it is finally getting the exposure it deserves."[34]
Roger Ebert reviewed the re-release and said "It's not dated. It is powerful, genuinely shocking and rather amazing. It comes billed as a 'horror film' and contains a great deal of horror, but all of the horror is human and brutally realistic."[35] Don Groves of SBS gave the film four stars out of five, claiming that "Wake in Fright deserves to rank as an Australian classic as it packs enormous emotional force, was bravely and inventively directed, and features superb performances."[36] American critic Rex Reed, an early advocate of Wake in Fright, praised the film's restoration as "the best movie news of the year", and said it "may be the greatest Australian film ever made".[37] According to Australian musician and screenwriter Nick Cave, it is "the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence."[38] Stephen Vagg argued for InReview that "the thing often not appreciated about Wake in Fright is that most of the people Grant encounters are trying to be nice... This snobbish Baby Boomer is too good for the people he encounters or things they do but he doesn’t have the courage of his prejudices to avoid them."[21]
The film has an approval rating of 97% and a rating average score of 8.6/10 on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 59 reviews. The site's consensus states: "A disquieting classic of Australian cinema, Wake in Fright surveys a landscape both sun-drenched and ruthlessly dark."[15] On Metacritic, the film holds a score of 85 out of 100 based on reviews from 21 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[39]Wake in Fright is also listed in the 2015 edition of the film reference book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.[40]
Controversy
In addition to the film's atmosphere of sordid realism, the kangaroo hunting scene contains graphic footage of kangaroos actually being shot.[41] A disclaimer at the conclusion of the movie states:
PRODUCERS' NOTE
The hunting scenes depicted in this film were taken during an actual kangaroo hunt by professional licensed hunters.
For this reason and because the survival of the Australian kangaroo is seriously threatened, these scenes were shown uncut after consultation with the leading animal welfare organisations in Australia and the United Kingdom.
—Quoted from the movie credits.
The hunt lasted several hours, and gradually wore down the filmmakers. According to cinematographer Brian West, "the hunters were getting really drunk and they started to miss, ... It was becoming this orgy of killing and we [the crew] were getting sick of it." Kangaroos hopped about helplessly with gun wounds and trailing intestines. Producer George Willoughby fainted after seeing a kangaroo "splattered in a particularly spectacular fashion". The crew orchestrated a power failure in order to end the hunt.[42]
At the 2009 Cannes Classic screening of Wake in Fright, 12 people walked out during the kangaroo hunt.[43]
Kotcheff, a vegetarian,[44] has defended his use of the hunting footage in the film.[45]
Restoration and home-media releases
For many years, the only known print of Wake in Fright, found in Dublin, was considered of insufficient quality for transfer to DVD or videotape for commercial release. In response to this situation, Wake in Fright's editor, Anthony Buckley, began to search in 1994 for a better-preserved copy of the film in an uncut state. Eight years later, in Pittsburgh, Buckley found the negatives of Wake in Fright in a shipping container labelled "For Destruction". He rescued the material, which formed the basis for the film's painstaking 2009 restoration.[46] Evidently a 35mm print in excellent condition had also survived in the collection of the Library of Congress, which screened it in the library's Mary Pickford Theater in 2008, although its reported running time of only 96 minutes suggests this was an edited version.[47]
Wake in Fright was released on DVD and Blu-ray formats by Madman Entertainment on 4 November 2009,[48] based on a digital restoration completed earlier that year. This restoration was shown to the general public for the first time at the Sydney Film Festival in June 2009, and in re-release has been called "a classic Australian film which has achieved cult status".[49]
Umbrella Entertainment has since acquired the global distribution rights to the film. Umbrella announced on 17 May 2024 that they have produced a completely new restoration of the film, supervised by Mark Hartley, based on a fresh 4K re-scan from the original camera negative.[50]
Notes
↑ Throughout principal photography, Kotcheff reworked parts of the script without receiving a credit.[1]
Related Research Articles
John Hadley Thompson, AM is an Australian actor and a major figure of Australian cinema, particularly Australian New Wave. He is best known for his role as a lead actor in several acclaimed Australian films, including such classics as The Club (1980), Sunday Too Far Away (1975), The Man from Snowy River (1982) and Petersen (1974). He won Cannes and AFI acting awards for the latter film.
Walkabout is a 1971 adventure survival film directed by Nicolas Roeg and starring Jenny Agutter, Luc Roeg, and David Gulpilil. Edward Bond wrote the screenplay, which is loosely based on the 1959 novel by James Vance Marshall. It centres on two white schoolchildren who are left to fend for themselves in the Australian Outback and who come across a teenage Aboriginal boy who helps them to survive.
William Theodore Kotcheff is a Canadian director and producer of film and television. He is known for directing such films as the seminal Australian New Wave picture Wake in Fright (1971), the Mordechai Richler adaptations The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) and Joshua Then and Now (1985), the original Rambo film First Blood (1982), and the comedies Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), North Dallas Forty (1979), and Weekend at Bernie's (1989).
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a 1974 Canadian comedy drama film directed by Ted Kotcheff, and adapted by Mordechai Richler and Lionel Chetwynd from Richler’s 1959 novel. It stars Richard Dreyfuss as the title character, a brash young Jewish Montrealer who embarks on a string of get-rich-quick schemes in a bid to gain respect. The cast also features Micheline Lanctôt, Randy Quaid, Joseph Wiseman, Denholm Elliott, Joe Silver and Jack Warden.
Welcome to Woop Woop is a 1997 Australian screwball comedy film directed by Stephan Elliott and starring Johnathon Schaech and Rod Taylor. The film was based on the novel The Dead Heart by Douglas Kennedy. "Woop Woop" is an Australian colloquialism referring to an inexact and extremely rustic and uncivilized location, usually in rural or remote Australia. Equivalent terms include "the boondocks" and "out in the sticks" in American English or "the back of beyond" in British English.
John William Pilbean Goffage MBE, known professionally as Chips Rafferty, was an Australian actor. Called "the living symbol of the typical Australian", Rafferty's career stretched from the late 1930s until he died in 1971, and during this time he performed regularly in major Australian feature films as well as appearing in British and American productions, including The Overlanders and The Sundowners. He appeared in commercials in Britain during the late 1950s, encouraging British emigration to Australia.
Wolf Creek is a 2005 Australian horror film written, co-produced and directed by Greg McLean and starring John Jarratt, Nathan Phillips, Cassandra Magrath and Kestie Morassi. Its plot concerns three backpackers who find themselves taken captive and subsequently hunted by Mick Taylor, a serial killer, in the Australian outback. The film was ambiguously marketed as being "based on true events", while its plot bore elements reminiscent of the real-life murders of backpackers by Ivan Milat in the 1990s and Bradley Murdoch in 2001, both of which McLean used as inspiration for the screenplay.
Kenneth Bernard Cook was an Australian journalist, television documentary maker, and novelist best known for his works Wake in Fright, which is still in print five decades after its first publication, and the humorous Killer Koala trilogy.
The Go-Between is a 1971 British historical drama film directed by Joseph Losey. Its screenplay by Harold Pinter is an adaptation of the 1953 novel The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley. The film stars Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Margaret Leighton, Michael Redgrave and Dominic Guard.
Gary James Bond was an English actor and singer. He is known for originating the role of Joseph in Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, his performances in several high-profile West End plays and musicals, and his portrayal of protagonist John Grant in the Australian film Wake in Fright (1971).
The 24th Cannes Film Festival was held from 12 to 27 May 1971. The Palme d'Or went to The Go-Between by Joseph Losey.
Steve Dodd was an Aboriginal Australian actor, notable for playing Aboriginal characters across seven decades of Australian film. After beginning his working life as a stockman and rodeo rider, Dodd was given his first film roles by prominent Australian actor Chips Rafferty. His career was interrupted by six years in the Australian Army during the Korean War, and limited by typecasting.
Snowtown is a 2011 Australian biographical crime drama directed by Justin Kurzel in his directorial debut and written by Shaun Grant based on the true story of the Snowtown murders.
Red Dog is a 2011 Australian comedy-drama family film written by Daniel Taplitz, directed by Kriv Stenders and produced by Nelson Woss and Julie Ryan. It stars Koko as the title character, Josh Lucas, Rachael Taylor, and John Batchelor. The film is based on the true story of Red Dog and uses the 2002 novel Red Dog by Louis de Bernières as the primary source. At the 2011 Inside Film Awards, Red Dog was nominated in nine categories and won seven, including best feature film. The film was also nominated for seven AACTA Awards and won for Best Film. The film was theatrically released on 4 August 2011 by Roadshow Film Distributors.
The Rover is a 2014 Australian dystopian Western drama film written and directed by David Michôd and based on a story by Michôd and Joel Edgerton. It is a contemporary western taking place in the Australian outback, ten years after a global economic collapse. The film stars Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson, and features Scoot McNairy, David Field, Anthony Hayes, Gillian Jones, and Susan Prior. It premiered out of competition in the Midnight Screenings section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival on 18 May 2014.
Wolf Creek 2 is a 2013 Australian horror film co-written and directed by Greg McLean. The film is a sequel to the 2005 film Wolf Creek and stars John Jarratt, reprising his role as Mick Taylor. It was released on 30 August 2013 at the Venice Film Festival, then released in Australia on 20 February 2014.
Wake in Fright (1961) is the debut novel by Australian author Kenneth Cook.
Monster Fest is an annual genre film festival held in Melbourne, Australia, dedicated to cult and horror cinema. As of 2017 it is the only genre film festival held in Australia to be supported by the federal screen agency, Screen Australia.
Wake in Fright is an Australian miniseries based on Kenneth Cook's 1961 novel of the same name, which first aired on Network Ten in October 2017. Directed by Kriv Stenders and written by Stephen M. Irwin, the series features an ensemble cast that includes Sean Keenan, Alex Dimitriades, Caren Pistorius, David Wenham, Anna Samson, Gary Sweet, and Robyn Malcolm.
The Removalists is a 1975 Australian film based on the play of the same name.
1 2 "One UA, 3 Columbia Films Are Exhibited at Cannes". BoxOffice. 31 May 1971. E-2. "The Cannes Film Festival, which ended Thursday (27) got under way on May 13 with an opening night presentation of 'Outback,' a United Artists release which was the official Australian entry."
↑ Godfrey, Nicholas (April 2017). "National nightmare: Mob Mentality and Colonial Failure in Wake in Fright". Screen Education (85). Australian Teachers of Media: 116.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
