1971@50: WAKE IN FRIGHT

One of the most significant films in Australian history was made by a Canadian. While Ted Kotcheff has since made some other notables like the bleak comedy Fun with Dick and Jane and kicking off the Rambo franchise with First Blood, Wake in Fright is the one he is best remembered for here in the Yabba. While First Blood might have stabilised the staggered post-Rocky career of Sylvester Stallone, Wake in Fright got an entire culture thinking about itself and asking tough questions that might yet be posed today. The film took the boozy, backslapping mateship image we cultivated, held it up to show its warts, violent and confrontingly primeval to a degree that allows little wonder as to why the film was allowed to languish for decades before a recent revival. Wake in Fright is beautifully produced but as rough as the morning after a bender.

Young teacher and debt slave John heads off on the train to a distant airport for not enough R&R in Sydney before he heads back to the Venusian landscape where he lives and works until some clerk of the City of Dis shall free him. In the town where he has to stay until the hook up with the plane can happen he drops by the pub where the local cop binds him into endless rounds of beer until the flag flies and a severe ANZAC remembrance ritual imprisons him in a cage of thick patriotism. Getting back to his room his now addled fancy looks at the money he wasn't able to spend back in the plains of Abaddon and thinks if he only wins enough to break free of his government contract he could hop in one of his reveries about gambolling on the beach forever. So he takes the cash, gets into the den and loses the lot. He'd been getting some kip in before time with his girlfriend in fabulous Sydney but now he is at the pleasure of a town full of sweating orcs with bulging muscles and a hunger for anyone a hair's breadth astray from the norm. 

John's trek through this has more social obstacles, wrong-footing and outright violence than a weekend at Dostoyevsky's. If you've ever pulled an allnighter with friends, particularly when around the teen to twenties range, and you find yourself accepting a stubby after daylight is long out of the gate you will recall how vile that beer tastes. What began last night as a pleasantly bitter buzz-maker is now a kind of urinous choler drawn from a corpse but by now you're doing it from habit, having gone well past any need for peer pressure. It tastes like chilled salt water and will only get worse after you've escaped from your dear friends and are vomiting in the comfort of your own bed. That's what a lot of this film tastes like. 

After John has entered a kind of undeclared indentured servitude with the locals his progress through the sludgey days gets so slow it looks like he's moving with a ball and chain around his ankle. It might be the explosively bilious end to a suggested sexual encounter or the Boschian nightmare of a midnight roo hunt or back at a shack where he no longer knows or cares about his host's identity or intentions. I'm not going to spoil the final act of this story but if you do watch it for a first time maybe leave the beer in the fridge and pretend the soda water you've had there from the last dinner with friends is alcoholic. You won't want to drink after this piece.

The source novel of Wake in Fright is Australian and the film is close to it. This is Ted Kotcheff's adaptation of established material rather than the rage of an Auslaender. He is aided by his star Gary Bond's foreign status (British). Apart from Donald Pleasance as the quietly terrifying Doc (also British but you wouldn't know it from this role) everyone else is a local, not to the Yabba but to the bigger version of it that ends at the three mile limit in the drink of the surrounding oceans. At an early screening one irate bloke got to his feet and yelled, "that's not us!" Cast member Jack Thompson yelled back and louder, "It is us. Sit down!" 

If you were to watch this and think that the Australia depicted here might have shamed us into a kind of social sobriety you should probably stay away from this one. A year after its release the Whitlam government was taken to victory in the federal election and began a scouring program of reform that brought the country out of the nineteenth century for the first time. Whitlam didn't last and as long lived as his legacy was its erosion by the worst of us continues to this day.

Sorry, got political. But that's the kind of response this film demands. Where are we now in relation to this corrosive culture? Your answer might not please you. I can at least recommend the Blu-Ray brought out in the last decade of the restored film. It's a stunner, compelling its viewers to feel the intense heat of the landscape, the breathless closeness of the pub and the mental haze of days sunken in ponds of beer and waste. There's a moment early on where a pre-ruined John is in the pub with Jock the cop (a bravely anti-type Chips Rafferty) and finishes the beer that the cop has bought him. Jock fixes him in a look that will not break until the ritual action is complete. John gets another round. He will not be sober again for what will feel like a lifetime.

The last one of these anniversary articles I did was on Walkabout. That is a film that could have been set anywhere with a wilderness but happened to be Australia. If Wake in Fright had been set on Mars it would still be about Australia.

PS - I mentioned the real animal violence in Walkabout. The roo hunt in Wake in Fright is also real and is worth reading about before you press play.