Wake in Fright

Wake In Fright
US theatrical poster under the Outback title
Directed by	Ted Kotcheff
Produced by	George Willoughby
Written by	Evan Jones
Starring	Gary Bond Donald Pleasence Chips Rafferty
Music by	John Scott
Cinematography	Brian West
Editing by	Anthony Buckley
Studio	NLT, Group W
Distributed by	United Artists (acquired in early 1971 for world distribution)
Release date(s)	9 October 1971 (1971-10-09)
Running time	109 minutes
Country	Australia
Language	English
Budget	A$800,000

Wake in Fright (also known as Outback) is a 1971 Australian film directed by Ted Kotcheff and starring Gary Bond, Donald Pleasence and Chips Rafferty. The screenplay was written by Evan Jones, based on Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel of the same name.

Made on a budget of A$800,000, the movie was an Australian/American co-production by NLT Productions and Group W. Wake in Fright tells the story of a young school teacher who descends into personal moral degradation after finding himself stranded in a brutal, menacing town in outback Australia.

For many years, Wake In Fright enjoyed a reputation as Australia’s great "lost film" because of its unavailability on VHS or DVD, as well as its absence from television broadcasts. In mid-2009, however, a thoroughly restored digital re-release was shown in Australian theatres to considerable acclaim. Later that same year it was issued commercially on DVD and Blu-ray.

Plot

John Grant (Gary Bond) is a middle-class teacher from the big city. He feels disgruntled because of the onerous terms of a financial bond which he signed with the government in return for receiving a tertiary education. The bond has forced him to accept a post to the tiny school at Tiboonda, a remote township in the arid Australian Outback. It is the start of the Christmas school holidays and Grant plans going to Sydney to visit his girlfriend but first, however, he must travel by train to the nearby mining town of Bundanyabba (known as “The Yabba”) in order to catch a Sydney-bound flight.

At "The Yabba", Grant encounters several disconcerting residents including a policeman, Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty), who encourages Grant to consume repeated glasses of beer before introducing him to the local obsession with the gambling game of two-up. Hoping to win enough money to pay off his bond and escape his "slavery" as an outback teacher, Grant at first has a winning streak playing two-up but then loses all his cash. Unable now to leave "The Yabba", Grant finds himself dependent on the charity of bullying strangers while being drawn into the crude and hard-drinking lifestyle of the town's residents.

Grant reluctantly goes drinking with a resident named Tim Hynes (Al Thomas) and goes to Tim's house. Here he meets Tim's daughter, Janette (played by Sylvia Kay, the then-wife of the movie's director Ted Kotcheff). While he and Janette talk, several men who have gathered at the house for a drinking session question Grant’s masculinity, asking: “What’s the matter with him? He’d rather talk to a woman than drink beer.” Janette then tries to initiate an awkward sexual episode with Grant, who vomits. Grant finds refuge of a sort, staying at the shack of an alcoholic medical practitioner known as "Doc" Tydon (Donald Pleasence). Doc tells him that he and many others have had sex with Janette. He also gives Grant pills from his medical kit, ostensibly to cure Grant's hangover.

Later, a drunk Grant participates in a barbaric kangaroo hunt with Doc and Doc's friends Dick (Jack Thompson) and Joe (Peter Whittle). The hunt culminates in Grant clumsily stabbing a wounded kangaroo to death, followed by a pointless drunken brawl between Dick and Joe and the vandalising of a bush pub. At night's end, Grant returns to Doc's shack, where Doc apparently initiates a homosexual encounter between the two.

A repulsed Grant leaves the next morning and walks across the desert. He tries to hitch-hike to Sydney, but accidentally boards a truck that takes him straight back to "The Yabba". He contemplates shooting Doc, but instead attempts suicide. Grant recovers in hospital from his suicide attempt and Doc sees him off at "The Yabba's" rail station. He returns to Tiboonda for the new school year.

Cast

Wake in Fright was Chips Rafferty's final film appearance

• Gary Bond as John Grant
• Donald Pleasence as Doc Tydon
• Chips Rafferty as Jock Crawford
• Sylvia Kay as Janette Hynes
• John Meillon as Charlie
• Jack Thompson as Dick
• Peter Whittle as Joe
• Al Thomas as Tim Hynes
• Dawn Lake as Joyce

Production

A film version of Wake in Fright, based on the 1961 novel by Kenneth Cook, was linked with the actor Dirk Bogarde and the director Joseph Losey as early as 1963. Morris West later secured the film rights and tried, unsuccessfully, to raise funding for the film's production. The rights were eventually bought by NLT and Group W. and Canadian director Ted Kotcheff was recruited to direct the film. At the time of production, Kotcheff had directed two films, Tiara Tahiti (1962) and Two Men Sharing (1969). 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).

Wake in Fright's shooting began in Australia in January 1970 at Broken Hill, New South Wales (the area which had inspired Cook for the setting of his novel), with interiors shot the next month at Ajax Studios in the Sydney beachside 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, the future Australian cinema star, among its cast members. Coincidentally, Rafferty (real name John William Pilbean Goffage) had been born in Broken Hill, the film's stand-in for "The Yabba", in 1909.

Response

The world premiere of Wake in Fright (as Outback) occurred at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, held in May. Ted Kotcheff was nominated for a Golden Palm Award. The film opened commercially in France on 22 July 1971, Great Britain on 29 October 1971, Australia during the same month and the United States on 20 February 1972.

Wake In Fright received generally excellent reviews throughout the world and 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".^{[citation needed]}

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 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”.^{[citation needed]} 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."

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. Wake in Fright is one of only two films ever to screen twice in the history of the festival (the other is Michelangelo Antonioni's film L'Avventura, winner of the Prix du Jury - Jury Prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, which also screened as part of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival's Cannes Classics selection).

Controversy

In addition to the film's atmosphere of sordid realism, the kangaroo hunting scene contains graphic footage of kangaroos actually being shot. A disclaimer at the conclusion of the movie states:

Producers’ Note. Photography of the hunting scenes in this film took place during an actual kangaroo hunt conducted by licensed professional hunters. No kangaroos were expressly killed for this motion picture. Because the survival of the Australian kangaroo is seriously threatened these scenes were included with approval of leading animal welfare organisations in Australia and the United Kingdom.

Restoration and release on DVD and Blu-ray

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. Ten 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. Another complete copy of Wake in Fright, reputedly in good condition, exists in the collection of the Library of Congress, which has screened it in the library's Mary Pickford Theater.

Wake in Fright was released on DVD and Blu-ray formats, on 4 November 2009, from 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 received wide and consistently positive coverage in the Australian media.

Further reading

• Adams, B & Shirley, G. (1983) Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, Angus and Robertson, ISBN 0312061269
• Caterson, S., (2006) "The Best Australian Film You've Never Seen", Quadrant, pp. 86–88, Jan-Feb 2006.
• Greenwood, P. (2006) Wake in Fright, Murdoch University, [wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/film/dbase/2006/wake.doc]. Accessed 15 January 2007.
• McFarlane, B. (1999) The Oxford Companion to Australian Film, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, Melbourne. ISBN 978-0-19-553797-0
• Maddox, G. (2004) "Treasure, not trash: classic found in US", The Sydney Morning Herald, p 13, 16 October 2004.
• Maltin, L. (2006) Leonard Maltin’s 2006 Movie Guide, Signet, ISBN 0451216091.
• Pike, A. & Cooper, R. (1998) Australian Film 1900–1977, Oxford University Press, Melbourne. ISBN 0 19 550784 3
• Williamson, G. (2006) “The Forum”, The Australian, p. 5, 30 December 2006.
• Zion, L. (2006) "DVD Letterbox", The Australian, p. 25, 29 July 2006.

External links

• Wake In Fright at the National Film and Sound Archive
• Wake In Fright at the Internet Movie Database