WAKE IN FRIGHT @ 55

John Grant is in a bind. Young, intelligent and middle class, he signed on for a teaching career as a way of getting to an interesting and fulfilling life through a transformation into journalism. But the Department sent him to Woop Woop to teach the entire schoolage population in a single room as flies buzzed around them and the great arid outback wasteland spread to all horizons. He's in a bind because the only two ways of escaping are through seeing his contract through or buying his way out at a hefty 1971 thousand dollars. Not even the lump he gets for his upcoming holidays would come close to that.

But he is about to flee the scene for the Christmas holidays. His frequent daydreams of his girlfriend in Sydney emerging from crystal waters, gliding over the sand to plant a soft and loving kiss on his mouth keep him going through the rowdy train journey with its deafening drunks and racial exclusion. He has to stop at Bundanyabba overnight to hook up with a Sydney flight the next day. 

The Yabba clings around a mine and its pub is filled with loud, sweating men. John, bumping his way through to the bar gets a beer and retires to the closest thing to a private corner he can find. The cigarette he takes out is lit by Jock the local cop whose avuncular method of interrogation has John blurting out his predicament and sense of superiority over everyone that surrounds them. Jock then proceeds to lock John into the kind of shouting match that, in the Aussie lingo, only ends up with everyone plastered and vomiting beer. 

At the end of the night, at John's pleas, Jock takes to an afterhours diner where he finally gets something to soak up all that beer and hosts a constant two-up game. John looks at the Boschian nightmare of barking men in a room whose odour makes it through to the celluloid it was shot on, and he thinks: one thousand dollars. Soon enough he's shirtless. Bye bye, plane to Sydney and even train back to Tiboonda. He's stuck. If his teaching job was in Purgatory where he might just wait it out before redemption, he's now in Hell, possibly forever like the old Doc Tydon a man whose peace with the Yabba has made him poetically cynical and irretrievably depraved. 

What follows is a journey through that blistering wasteland. There's more ribbing and torment, violence and spooring toxic masculinity and rivers of beer. Kenneth Cook's source novel (same title) is a reference to an old saw: dream of the Devil and wake in fright. Well, that happened

Ted Kotchieff's film of the book from Evan Jones's screenplay is a carefully measured depiction of a steel trap closing on a victim. From the oppressively overheated plains of the opening shots to the inferni both meteorological and human, the crowd choreography that never feels staged, to the insertion of the brutal roo hunt, Kotchieff builds a world of minimally clothed savagery that, substantially exists to this day. The inclusion of period slang customs, aside, Wake in Fright feels as timeless as Hell itself.

The movie was considered lost. I saw it on late night TV in Brisbane in the early '80s but that was from the same kind of crud source that made it onto home video. It wasn't until the 2000s that the original elements were excavated and restored that anyone saw it in anything like its original form. I say this because the lost years created an impression that John Grant plummeted into a world of torture and depravity because of the bad boys in town but a good solid viewing of the film shows an ostensibly civilised man tearing away at the cuts from a few stoushes to find himself as feral as all the others. The early signals of his conversational hubris are punished until his increasing compliance is brought to screaming life as he strives to outdo the worst acts he sees, to make that same claim of superiority. He is not a babe in the woods, he is the sneering, me-first overgrown baby that anyone can be if given a little licence.

When he has a moment of lucidity towards the very end and rails at a local about the nightmare ethics of the culture, it's only partly from moral outrage; the other part is his failure to excel at it. The conclusion, emerging minus his pretensions to accept a fate mundane, humbling and ugly, shows us one changed from baseless arrogance to a life of accepted mediocrity. It's my view that it's this, rather than the obnoxiousness of the Yabbans that audiences in this country really objected to. If we really were that worried about bush machismo we wouldn't have had Crocodile Dundee.

But it's not all extreme fist fights and pub lore and an unforgiving pallet of barren earth that makes Wake in Fright the deserving classic that it is. We also get performances the like of which Australian cinema had never sported and it was a rich mix of bravura playing and sullen natrualism. 

Gary Bond, a British stage actor, gives John Grant a put upon pain that his looks (near identical to Peter O'Toole) and initial confidence render reasonable. His transformation through brutality are all the more striking and even shocking because of this. Australian veteran actor Chips Rafferty was never before not after as sinister as he is here. Typically, the Everystralian, good bloke in every crowd, character, he presents that but with a manipulative edge and a sneering superiority that has seen too many John Grants to care about their formal education and airs. In context, his performance is the most frightening.

Donald Pleasance, another import, is Australian enough to make it through his lines smoothly gives us a brutalised man whose pragmatism suggests far darker bargains and interactions than we see here. Sylvia Kay whose longing eyes show a detachment to her surroundings that has led her to a confusion between escape and oblivion whereby her joyless sexual excursions have become her sole exit. The attempted seduction of John and his response (is it revulsion or just too much beer?) ends with a rebuttoning and a lack of comment. For her the myth of Sisyphus might as well be a kind of lifestyle porn. The young Jack Thompson who was about to have an enviable '70s, bursts in with all the dangerous energy of that bloke at the barbie that you hear before you see, loud, intimidating, unstoppable. Hell of a debut.

Is this film unfair? On release, it was championed by all the John Grants in the community and condemned by all the Jock Crawfords. Did it really take a foreigner to show us ourselves? Ted Kotcheff went on to the satire Fun With Dick and Jane and the tougher First Blood. He knew the importance of details in world building so that the globe is bigger when seen in closeup. The documentary feel to the crowd scenes would have been familiar to local viewers from the likes of 4 Corners on the ABC. That he set a compelling drama within that points forward to the decade of Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman. He wasn't attacking Australia or its stereotypical blokes, they just got in the way via the setting of a novel. Masculinity? Yes, that's most of the bullseye on the target as it is the root cause of almost everything in the general malaise. It's not Australian culture but that of a people who will not break it where it needs breaking. We might have moved on, here, but incidents like the Nazis at populist rallies and deflating referendums (the Voice as well as the republic) and other horrors lead us right back to the room for improvement. Wake in Fright is not a time caspule. It's a clear and present caution.

Viewing notes: For this blog I watched Umbrella's outstanding 4K presentation of the 2000s restoration. Goodbye gluey video, this looks like film. It's available on 4K with a Blu-ray on disc, and streaming for hire on several platforms. A the moment you can see it for free with ads on Brollie and without ads on ABC iView. Go ye!