Wake In Fright (18.)
Directed by Ted Kotcheff. Starring Gary Bonds, Donald Pleasance, Jack Thompson, Chips Rafferty and Sylvia Kay. 1971. 114 mins
Wake in Fright is apparently a lost classic of Australian cinema, the negative of which was a week away from being burnt and lost forever. Made in 1971, by the future director of the first Rambo movie, it is a grizzly, gruesome tale of a lost, long weekend in the outback.
While Nicholas Cage goes to Las Vegas with the definite purpose of drinking himself to death, John Grant (Bond) goes to mining outpost The Yabba on an overnight stay to get a plane back to Sydney for the Christmas holiday. A pommie school teacher stationed in the back of beyond he is waylaid by the local hospitality, loses all his money and misses his plane home, plunging himself into a ruinous and destructive circle of drinking with some local roaring boys and sinister alkie doctor, Pleasance.
The film has been championed by Martin Scorsese, who ensured that along with L’Aventurra it is the only film to have played twice in the Cannes Film Festival. But Scorsese often seems to be a man who never met a piece of celluloid he didn’t love and I’m not sure if this really is some lost masterpiece, though it definitely has a powerful sense of place and of the aggressive unpretentiousness of the Aussie outbacker: “have a drink with me will ya?”
(Spoiler, a lot of its shocking power and that 18 certificate relates to a graphic Kangaroo hunting sequence. We are assured that no animals were killed for the film, that it was shot during regular Kangaroo hunts, but it is still an uncomfortable watch.)
The film is intended as an existential nightmare though it could just as well be an allegory of the last Ashes cricket tour with a seeming sophisticated, cultivated man being reduced to a gibbering debauched embarrassment at frightening speed. On the occasion of its release, Australian audiences shunned it and their critics turned on it, angered by foreigners (Kotcheff is Canadian and scriptwriter Evan Jones was Anglo-Jamaican) creating such a crude vision of their working stock. I’d have felt the same in their shoes but it is an oddly sympathetic vision: Grant is stuck up and superior but everywhere he goes people are friendly to him and insist on buying him a drink even though they know he lost all his money and can’t get them one back. They may be crass, violent and boorish but they are enormously generous and always willing to stand their round. As existential nightmares go, it’s not the worse.
Directed by Ted Kotcheff. Starring Gary Bonds, Donald Pleasance, Jack Thompson, Chips Rafferty and Sylvia Kay. 1971. 114 mins
Wake in Fright is apparently a lost classic of Australian cinema, the negative of which was a week away from being burnt and lost forever. Made in 1971, by the future director of the first Rambo movie, it is a grizzly, gruesome tale of a lost, long weekend in the outback.
While Nicholas Cage goes to Las Vegas with the definite purpose of drinking himself to death, John Grant (Bond) goes to mining outpost The Yabba on an overnight stay to get a plane back to Sydney for the Christmas holiday. A pommie school teacher stationed in the back of beyond he is waylaid by the local hospitality, loses all his money and misses his plane home, plunging himself into a ruinous and destructive circle of drinking with some local roaring boys and sinister alkie doctor, Pleasance.
The film has been championed by Martin Scorsese, who ensured that along with L’Aventurra it is the only film to have played twice in the Cannes Film Festival. But Scorsese often seems to be a man who never met a piece of celluloid he didn’t love and I’m not sure if this really is some lost masterpiece, though it definitely has a powerful sense of place and of the aggressive unpretentiousness of the Aussie outbacker: “have a drink with me will ya?”
(Spoiler, a lot of its shocking power and that 18 certificate relates to a graphic Kangaroo hunting sequence. We are assured that no animals were killed for the film, that it was shot during regular Kangaroo hunts, but it is still an uncomfortable watch.)
The film is intended as an existential nightmare though it could just as well be an allegory of the last Ashes cricket tour with a seeming sophisticated, cultivated man being reduced to a gibbering debauched embarrassment at frightening speed. On the occasion of its release, Australian audiences shunned it and their critics turned on it, angered by foreigners (Kotcheff is Canadian and scriptwriter Evan Jones was Anglo-Jamaican) creating such a crude vision of their working stock. I’d have felt the same in their shoes but it is an oddly sympathetic vision: Grant is stuck up and superior but everywhere he goes people are friendly to him and insist on buying him a drink even though they know he lost all his money and can’t get them one back. They may be crass, violent and boorish but they are enormously generous and always willing to stand their round. As existential nightmares go, it’s not the worse.
