Wake in Fright (1971)

***½/****
starring Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond, Chips Rafferty, Jack Thompson
screenplay by Evan Jones, based on the novel by Kenneth Cook
directed by Ted Kotcheff


Wakeinfright

by Angelo Muredda As exploitation-movie titles go, Wake in Fright suggests a high-concept
reversal of A Nightmare on Elm Street, where the only way to fall
prey to bogeymen is to stay awake. It's a bit of an odd sell, given the more
abstract horror mined by Toronto-born filmmaker Ted Kotcheff, of both The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and First Blood fame. Far from Kravitz
country in its Australian setting but still working in the same territory of
young, ambling men who want to be somebody, Kotcheff's earlier film–first
screened in 1971 to both wild acclaim and great distaste from animal-rights
activists, and somewhat forgotten until its resurrection in the
"Ozploitation" documentary Not Quite Hollywood–is more
interested in the terror of duration without purpose, of waking up when you
have no good reason, than in anything so prosaic as a slasher. Elm Street it
isn't, then, but Kotcheff burrows into his haughty lead's descent into himself–a
stand-in for every thirtysomething man's realization that his coming-of-age has
already happened, to no discernible effect–with a nihilist precision that's
tough to shake off.

The man in crisis is John (Gary Bond), a big-city drip who teaches, not by choice, in the outback town of Tiboonda, unveiled in an alienating opening crane shot
that pans around the dusty schoolhouse to reveal a full circle of nothingness.
The 360° survey at once is and isn't
a joke. To be sure, it's an overdetermined and flatly symbolic introduction to
the frustrated progress of the outbackers we'll come to meet, from the student
who casually mentions that he'll see John next year, likely in the same class,
to John's erudite double Tydon (Donald Pleasence), a disgraced Sydney doctor
come to practice in a mining town known by the locals as The Yabba, where his
alcoholism is indistinguishable from everyone else's. Wake in Fright is also an earnest
study of how accidents of geography make people into the kinds of failures they
are–the first town's endless blue skies and dirty tracks planting an innate
skepticism of outsiders in the minds of locals before they can even begin to
conceive of an outside.

Tydon's resignation to the deadening rhythms of The Yabba– "Could
be worse," he muses, "this beer could run out"–makes him an
obvious foil for the cosmopolitan John. Although their exchanges are boilerplate male angst on
some level, there's a sublime pulpiness to their embodiment of different
sides of defeat that recalls the meaty philosophical shoptalk of a good Jack
London novel. Working in a heightened register much of the time despite the
blank formalism of the opening, Kotcheff deftly complements this
plotting-by-allegory with his visual schema, returning to the image of a nozzle
endlessly refilling empty pint glasses in sharp parody of the town's dead-end
opulence.

The overflowing cup becomes a totem for John, especially in the film's visceral centrepiece, a daytime bender that culminates in an endless, nearly unwatchable kangaroo hunt. Much has
been made of the grotesqueness of this footage, which shows the actual maiming and
taunting of animals, but the less confrontational prelude is just as striking. Plowing
through the shoddy roads of the outback in a beat-up car and firing aimlessly
at everything that moves in the late-afternoon sun, the men turn into demonic
revellers with rifles and shotguns–spiritual godfathers to the shanty-town
flatteners from Bad Boys 2
rather than something so dignified as hunters. There's no doubting that the
critique is on-the-nose here: Purposelessness breeds disrespect, and men with
nothing to aim at in their own lives can't help but aim elsewhere with
life-denying contempt. Yet the message is of a piece with the abrasive but consistently smart filmmaking, which plants its ideas early and grows them with
uncommon care.

Wake in Fright opens today at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

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9 Comments

  1. Lon Nol Lol

    Thanks Angelo, but I’m still none the wiser just what this film’s about nor the significance of the photo.

  2. Lon Nol Lol

    Thanks Angelo, but I’m still none the wiser just what this film’s about nor the significance of the photo.

  3. Lon Nol Lol

    Thanks Angelo, but I’m still none the wiser just what this film’s about nor the significance of the photo.

  4. Lon — OK: A haughty bonded schoolteacher in an Australian outback town heads for Sydney but gets waylaid in The Yabba, a Neverland for alcoholic brutes who wrestle, shoot kangaroos, and play Two-Up. Hence the coins.

  5. Lon — OK: A haughty bonded schoolteacher in an Australian outback town heads for Sydney but gets waylaid in The Yabba, a Neverland for alcoholic brutes who wrestle, shoot kangaroos, and play Two-Up. Hence the coins.

  6. Lon — OK: A haughty bonded schoolteacher in an Australian outback town heads for Sydney but gets waylaid in The Yabba, a Neverland for alcoholic brutes who wrestle, shoot kangaroos, and play Two-Up. Hence the coins.

  7. Michael Taylor

    Best to type these kinds of questions out rather than just look up a plot summary on literally any movie website.

  8. Michael Taylor

    Best to type these kinds of questions out rather than just look up a plot summary on literally any movie website.

  9. Michael Taylor

    Best to type these kinds of questions out rather than just look up a plot summary on literally any movie website.

Comments are closed