Wake in Fright

Wake In Fright
US theatrical poster under the Outback title
Directed by	Ted Kotcheff
Written by	Evan Jones
Produced by	George Willoughby
Starring	Gary Bond Donald Pleasence Chips Rafferty
Cinematography	Brian West
Edited by	Anthony Buckley
Music by	John Scott
Production companies	NLT, Group W
Distributed by	United Artists (acquired in early 1971 for world distribution)
Release date	1971
Running time	109 minutes
Country	Template:FilmAustralia
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 of Wake in Fright 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 fly-speck situated in the arid Australian Outback. It is the start of the Christmas school holidays, and Grant plans to journey to Sydney to visit his girlfriend and surf at the beach. But first, 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 denizens of the town. They include a police sergeant, 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 thus 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 sucked into the crude and hard-drinking lifestyle of the town's residents.

Grant reluctantly goes drinking with a Bundanyabba named Tim Hynes (Al Thomas) and goes to Tim's house. Here he meets Tim's daughter, 30-something 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 initiates an awkward sexual episode with Grant, who vomits and eventually passes out drunk. 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 a pill from his medical kit, ostensibly to cure Grant's hangover.

Later, an inebriated 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 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 the 1961 Kenneth Cook novel, Wake in Fright, was linked with the actor Dirk Bogarde and the director Joseph Losey as early as 1963. Morris West later secured film rights and tried, unsuccessfully, to raise funding for the film's production. Eventually, the rights were bought by NLT and Group W. Canadian 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 that inspired Cook for the setting of his book), 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 to boast 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 garnering unanimous 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 Wake In Fright was “perhaps too uncomfortably direct and uncompromising to draw large Australian audiences".

More recently the unrestored version of Wake in Fright received a 3 stars (out of 4) 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 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."

Controversy

In addition to the film's atmosphere of sordid realism, the depiction of the kangaroo hunt that John Grant takes part in disturbed some viewers, for it contained graphic footage of an actual cull of the animals. A disclaimer stated that the kangaroos were not slaughtered specifically for the movie but rather by professional hunters during a government-licensed kill, and that “the scenes were included with approval of leading animal-welfare organizations in Australia and the United Kingdom”.

Restoration & resurrection on Blu-ray and DVD

For many years, the only known print of Wake In Fright, found in Dublin, was deemed to be of insufficient quality to justify its transfer to DVD or video tape for commercial release. In response to this unsatisfactory 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 the DVD and Blu-ray formats on 4 November 2009, from a digital restoration completed earlier that year. This restoration had been unveiled for the first time to the general public at the Sydney Film Festival during the month of June 2009, and it 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 IMDb