1971@50: LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH

A woman sits in a rowboat near the shore of a lake. She faces away from us and we hear her thoughts ask if what she has just been through is real or imagined. Cut to days before as she, Jessica, is being driven along with her husband and a friend to a family house in the country for some rest and rec. Authentic rest n rec, actually, as Jessica is just out from a spell in a mental health facility and needs some seriously fresh air. Along the way and on approaching the house she has glimpses, phantasms, of things that make her doubt herself. Figures in the landscape that disappear on a second look. Something just under the surface of the lake. When they get to the house she sees a pair of legs at the top of the stairs that run off. Her husband, Duncan, assuages her, "I saw it, too" and runs after the intruder along with the friend, Woody. They catch up with a young woman, a hippy drifter who was just going to stay until she rested up. She's not so threatening so she stays for dinner and the morning after the vote is to let her stay. Oh, she's Emily.

The rest of this is detail as we find out more about Emily and why someone in a family portrait from generations before looks exactly like her. Oh and why the locals are bandaged and blissed out as well as honking rednecks. Oh and who the eerie girl from the turn of the last century is trying to get their attention. This film does not claim to be anything other than a horror movie but the lack of tension as some of the more violent moments happen, whether through ineptitude or by design, gather a numb (not numb-ing) mesmerism.

What tension there is lies in how much of this is taking place in Jessica's fragile awareness as her head gets louder with whispers. Emily who might be a strange form of vampire or succubus is also disconcertingly of the present time and convincingly everyday, however seductive. Duncan does seem to care deeply for Jessica but a few phantasms later also seems to be using that as a mask for his steady drift into lust for Emily. The pace is slow. Sometimes that feels like art and sometimes it feels like inexperience. 

But then there are aspects which are deliberate. The electronic score variously shrieks, charms or weighs down with a stark drone or pulse, nothing like you'd expect from the rustic setting, however steeped it is in genre. The somatised yokels in the town seem to value their plasters and bandaids like a village of proto-Cronenbergian  new flesh zombies. Bingo! That, as I write it, is what I'm looking at: this film from 1971 looks like Shivers, Rabid or Videodrome from years later. 

It's on par with another anomalous horror film from the same year The Brotherhood of Satan which blended a pre-Exorcist occultism with a rough realism to great effect. The sense that this population-wide malady or cult effect will just keep spreading is only barely suggested but is present on screen. But then we end with Jessica still wondering about what she just experienced and if she didn't just concoct it with her brain chemistry. And you feel, when you see it that it only needs the tiniest flick of a Cronenberg for this tale to bloom into proto body horror - the close ups of the wounds you do get to see are ghastly for looking genuine rather than like fang punctures - and a cinematic revolution, however quiet.

CITIZEN KANE at 80

Reputation is a damper. It either kills or overfeeds and when the mighty arbiters at 3 a.m. party corridors pronounce upon a thing with a reputation it is to gain advancement for themself by doing damage to something else. And is Sgt. Pepper crap or touring Europe just Toy Town or are mocha coffee beans for wankers? Not objectively, no. If you came across that album and liked it, enjoyed yourself in the Czech Reuplic and love the aroma and taste of mocha keep it up; you're no closer to being wrong knowing what some git has thought of what you like. 

I didn't realise when, a year before my twentieth anniversary of being alive that I was about to watch the reputed greatest film ever made on something like its fortieth anniversary. The most I knew was that my Nanna had called it controversial. I was at Uni and saw the movie as part of my course on a crisp Brisbane winter morning with a cup of common room urn coffee. And was wowed by it from start to finish. The camera floats through a neon sign and down through a broken window. A scene of an argument on a stairwell is not accompanied by a bombastic orchestral accompaniment and feels as uncomfortable as it should. And that's before you get to the performances which vary from showy period-correct bluster to surprising naturalism. And that's before you get to the heart rending epic of grand American wasted life that is the tale of Citizen Kane.

The story goes like this: Charles Foster Kane is born to a poor rural couple in the frozen midwest but comes into a fortune when a deed to a mine put in his name turns into a ... gold mine. Removed from his parents by the family lawyer he grows up in loveless privilege in the big city, goes wild at university, getting expelled from each and then notices a newspaper business is part of his assets and on the hunch the it might be "fun to run a newspaper" takes it over and builds a massive media empire over the next decades, making fortune upon fortune. He marries once for a mix of love and connection (the president's niece) and then again for a mix of love and abusive control and finally breathes his last word, "rosebud" as a lonely man in a desolate palace.

That's not quite it. You get a few versions of this story from different sources and the timelines overlap and details in one can contradict others. From the snakelike camera tour of the faded grandeur giving an expressionistic idea of the man to the brash newsreel with its flat account of a life delivered in a vocal boom to the aged friends, colleagues and spouse still alive to tell their tales to Thompson the reporter. While they are all aged and slower and creakier than their youthful selves in their flashbacks, Thompson, standing in for us, is seldom more than a silhouette, shot from behind or in deep shadow, faceless and common, receiving just like us but asking the questions we would, empty until we pour our own personalities into him. This series of interviews takes up most of the film's screen time and through them we are given a great deal of information. Finally, we stand with Thompson (or he as us) on the floor of Xanadu piled with objects that might be a priceless classical statue or a two dollar snowglobe and we still know little more of Kane than we did after the intentionally superficial news story at the start. Thompson says what we think, that a word won't cut it to explain a life any more than a piece of one of the heaps of jigsaw puzzles on the floor. Finally, we do see what rosebud means and know that it was a moment of pure uncluttered joy, something that cost little but offered much including a brief escape from a hard moment into a brief sigh of peace. Credits.

Citizen Kane was not the first to do a lot of the things that people have claimed for it. If you want to see a ceiling in an interior (very unusual at the time) you can see The Wolfman beat Kane by almost a year. The architect of the still-impressive deep focus that characterises much of the look of the film made others before and did the same thing in them. The late thirties and early forties were a time of great innovation in cinema even at this mainstream level and any one of Kane's moments of virtuosity can be debunked as "Simpsons did it". If that were the point then Citizen Kane is an overrated impostor. But, that should never be the point. The point is the tale of a human whose fortunes and power grew faster than he did. It's a story of the America that Oscar Wilde spoke of when he said it had gone from barbarism to decadance without ever going through civilisation. That it was fashioned from the life of contemporary mogul William Randolph Hearst is worth knowing but it's better understood to be an act of modelling rather than portraiture; it's the type that's important, not the name (though there's one from our day we could put in here). Celebrations of the technique on screen in this film are less about firsts than how many. Welles, in setting out to scare the living daylights out of his country's radio listeners had already used everything he could find to bring War of the Worlds to the air as a kind of Ur found footage piece. Citizen Kane? Just add cinema.

But the flashy virtuosity is only part of the package. The fable of power's gouging force was in the screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz and Welles (and not just the former as propounded in the recent Netflix original Mank) that told a story that Welles drove with his real virtuosity: strong performances. Citizen Kane is a cinematic acting bonanza. Yes, Welles dominates this, that was Orson, but he fills the screen with a wealth of skill from his experience in New York theatre where his cast of colour McBeth (no, he didn't star in blackface, he just directed) and Julius Caesar set in contemporary fascist Italy delighted, engaged and outraged. He had a big loyal and energetic gang and you can see them on the screen. 

Ok, you might gag at the pantomime bluster of the Thatcher montage but that is treated as a kind of music hall sequence that leads to Welles's entrance in the film as the exact opposite (and you don't get the panto after that). Great scenes like the barnstorming campaign speech, the drunken sparring between Jed and Charlie after the election, Bernstein as an old man recalling the power of a glimpsed beauty from his youth (which is both writing and performance in equal measure), Susan Alexander's every scene as she develops through Kane's abuses from an artless but kind young woman into the shrieking trauma victim she is at the end. On that, there is a moment toward the end where, she is about to leave Kane who has started apologising and entreating. She's at the door. A smile forms on her face as though ihe might mean it this time. Then he destroys it with a pugilistic phrase and every harmonic of affection she had kept till then is silenced as she finds her resolve and tells him what he needs to hear. Afterwards, but soon, he goes back to the bedroom that he decorated with childlike illustrations and his old man's idea of what young women like, and tears at every piece of furniture, every drape, and does as much damage as he can. And there is not a note of musical score as this plays out in real time. The effect is brutal, its violence shouts out through time.

The more you see Citizen Kane the less you notice the whiz bang technological feats and the more you notice things like this, the acting, the telling of the tale. You might, assuming you were looking for it, notice the quite deliberate disposal of the three act scheme. We are looking at how the mess on the floor of the palace at the end came to be and however well meant the placing of each component it was only ever going to be a mess with Charlie Kane at the wheel. Is Charlie the loneliest emperor in that history? Is he what an American emperor might be? If we make it to the end we might wonder if we have just seen a message from history about the importance of remembering things.

So, is it genius? Well, like Eraserhead, Mozart's 40th, Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, Guernica, Hamlet, I don't care if it is or isn't. Citizen Kane works, it says (a few times) what its job is and does it. Is it perfect? Is anything and why should you want perfection? When Welles keeps nodding in one scene into the lap dissolve and it always feels too long does that really spoil a two hour film? What about the cartoon bats in the picnic scene? It was 1941, who was wrangling bats? Did you ever think of just sitting down and forgetting how long the title got shoved at the top of the pile of the "greatest ever made"? Still doesn't work for you? Fine, move on, just don't tell me that something I feel when I watch it isn't happening. Don't pretend you being iconoclastic by taking the easiest shot there is at something revered because you aren't the first and you are highly unlikely to be the best. Now that Citizen Kane has been toppled in recent polls by Hitchcock's Vertigo it might get a well earned breather but then that just means Vertigo is going to get it in the neck.

Another thing that occurs to me is that Welles's youth seems to be beneath more than a few of the attacks on his most famous film. He was twenty-six when the film was released. He was younger still when he caused such stirs in New York theatre and radio. If you've ever heard someone go on about the simplicity of early Mozart composition or Rimbaud stopped writing poetry at nineteen "for a reason"  then you have heard the saddening attempted first strike of a person guilty about their own lack of achievement in youth. Sad but true. Envy's gonna envy. Welles was twenty-six then and is long gone from us but Citizen Kane has turned eighty. So I've invited it into my living room tonight with reverance due its age and my own admiration and we're going to have a fine old chat. 

1971@50: BILLY JACK

A western town at the dawn of the '70s. The local honcho rustles mustangs with the aid of some good ole boys and a local deputy. Well he would if Bill Jack would let him but the trim ex-green beret peacenik who appears on horseback with a particularly persuasive manner and shuts it all down. Not before the big guy's son has humiliated his dad in front of the totin' rustlers by refusing to take a shot at one of the horses. Meanwhile that deputy has to take delivery of his runaway daughter, back and knocked up from a year in the post-Manson Haight Ashbury. Her dad is so enamoured of her plight that he slaps her around and she's a runaway again. This time she heads to the local free school in the desert, initially to hide out but soon gets into the groove of the place. It's run by an old earth mother called Jean who both lived through the '60s and remembers it. That's why she is running the school. Vietnam is still on and the draft is still on. Nixon's in the White House and the '70s are about to rewrite America.

Over the credits comes a staccato flute figure which blooms into a pop fable about a brutal village that wages war with another for a treasure that is just a piece of paper that says "peace on Earth". We've already seen Billy Jack and we've also seen the guy who really runs the town and even his malcontent son. The song tells us what to expect. So, the plot here is a lot less to the fore than its character elements. Hippy vs straight, if you like. Rebel vs conformity. New vs old. 

And this is just a hair past the Woodstock generation and its more grounded than the freedom trek in Easy Rider. There are things at stake. Sometimes they are drawn with a broad and sloppy brush but sometimes we get nuance, detail and some real cinema to tell the story. Billy Jack is like a lot of loner western heroes in that he seeks his own way but is drawn into others and has to confront that with violence. As with Shane he does it to protect the vulnerable. But it's 1971 not 1871 and there's no way of getting on a chestnut mare and riding over the horizon. It's the era of war and unrest on the news and iconic demons of the establishment in faceless riot gear. We can cheer all the small victories we want (and there are some glorious such moments on screen here) but we know how the battle ends and that, like the war that never seemed to end over in South East Asia, the big guns are backed by big money and power. That admission is what lifts Billy Jack from the mass of hippy vs cop exploitationers that rubbed shoulders with the bikie movies and the rest of it. Antonioni had had a decent stab at suggesting a new kind of American legend in the then recent Zabriskie Point but this one dragged the old mythology from the screen that gave birth to it and placed it around the corner on the day you saw it.

Which is why Billy Jack survived the worst of my uniform anti-hippy stance during the punk wars: it works and keeps working despite me wanting it to fail. I saw it as a kid in a family that seemed to be half hippy (upper middle class hippies, like they all seemed to be but still...) and the notions of social justice were welling up around us. I was indulged to grow my hair enough to be taunted by a pair of pencil sharpened local kids who taunted me with the word hippy as though that was going to work. I can remember stopping in the holiday Kombi by a beach and a posse of the local crew cuts came to stare at us longhairs in the front seats. The appearance of being on the other side was enough for them. We were the flagrant enemies of the great Australian way and our punishment was to receive the stares of cretins for the term of our natural lives. Well, that lasted until the late '70s when all of them had long hair to go with their neat casual attire and I started cutting mine to declare myself gleefully back in the margins. It wasn't just hair, of course, it was the whole damn culture and that's what got us roused in the cinema when this movie was on and then again when it ran on late night tv. You can get rady to scoff at the hamfisted message of peace but as soon as you see how it's really turning out you have to ditch all that.

I hung around the radio if One Tin Soldier came on and I wished you could get it played more. My sister sang the song that even in my not-yet-ten mind was a cringe: "When will Billy Love Me?" And now, most recently, watching it again as a fifty year old movie, I sat up and followed the moments of the story, the acting that was better than I recalled and the fable that worked a treat however much it was compromised by hokey ritual or vintage jive talk. The two stoners skit and the role reversal improv with the town elders are still funny. The end is still sobering. And way back, the sound of my voice along with everyone else in the hip Miss Samson's music class on a lazy afternoon at school as the glare burned out the North Queensland scenery:

Go ahead and hate your neighbor. Go ahead and cheat a friend

Do it in the name of heaven. You can justify it in the end

There won't be any trumpets blowing come the judgment day

On the bloody morning after 

One tin soldier rides away

Nothing, whether I admitted it or not, got me readier for punk rock than that hippy chorus.

Review: CAVEAT

A room in a decaying mansion. The lampshades are knocked askew and the wallpaper is either peeling or bruised. A young woman enters carrying a toy rabbit with human looking eyes and a drum. As she presents the toy to various doors she passes them by but when she comes to one the toy rabbit starts drumming. She opens the door. It leads to a basement. She descends the stairs and listens as the rabbit's drumming variously stops or starts up. She approaches a fresh looking section of wall, finds a tool to saw into it and looks through. Titles.

A young man who seems to be in mental health care is being given a job minding the niece of a dodgy older man. Sounds easy and the pay is good. The closer they get to the site the worse it looks. The house is on an island in a lake and the woman (from the opening sequence) is in a withdrawn state, sitting at the end of her room on the floor, her hands covering her face, seemingly catatonic. Oh, there's something else, the young man, Isaac, has to wear a brace that is connected to a chain that limits his reach in the house. After an argument he relents and puts the brace on as the dodgy man locks it. Ok, see you in a few days.

The rest of the film is a pitted contest between the intense creepiness of the setting and the unnerving actions of the woman, Olga, as she moves around the house in search of something undisclosed or freezes into motionless denial in her room. With nothing beyond this, Isaac tries to work out what the real situation is. As a light but effective electronic score swells around them they are both in for some dark discovery.

At its best this serious and unsettling film works as a strange melange of classic horror writers like M.R. James or Algernon Blackwood and the freezing eeriness of Samuel Beckett plays like Rockaby or Footfalls. This odd mix doesn't lessen even when the more generically horror scenes take place. If anything they are intensified by it. The sense of dread swelling through the rot in the walls mounts by the minute. This is enhanced by the stark and very deliberate high resolution video look which allows a rich colour pallet through does so with such clarity that the detail of it adds to the overall creepiness. The art direction would be overdone in a more generic film (it can look like a horror VR game at times) but here it just adds a painful rawness to the film.

The one aspect that detracts from all of this is the exposition. There are a number of twists which force the film into more conventional genre territory and they feel clumsy by comparison. While these are not as annoying as the exposition scene in Suspiria (which all but crushes the strongly wrought nightmare logic of that film) I wish they'd been under composed. That aside Caveat does rediscover its strength in the silence of its statements and ends with a quiet weight. Did you see and like last year's Relic? You should see and like this.

Currently on Shudder.

1971@50: SUMMER OF 42

It's 1942 and most of the male role models are in uniform and far from the serene Nantucket Island which is sighing with pleasure through a bright summer. That leaves the friends Hermie, Oscy and the still childlike Benjie free to roam the dunes and town to prank and hang out until school's back in. Barely pushing back the hormones their entire conversation is composed of sex: how to do it, what does it feel like, what to do when it happens, and everything else that a virginal male mind can think to ask. Apart from the ancient instructional tome Benjie has swiped from his holiday house, all they have to go on is their own fantasy. As far as the statistical grab of their imagination and philosophical concern go this telling gets it right. But what happens when sex, the real thing, comes knocking and things have to be done?

I read Summer of 42 as a teenager and like it's characters I concentrated on the sexual bits in it but I was a deep reader for my age and did manage to get the rest of it. While the novel is couched in a lot of sentimentalism and told entirely from a male perspective the notion of coming of age is both signified and fulfilled by sex is dismantled through a quite honest examination of the pre and post coital thinking of adolescents. There is a kind of Lord of the Flies of scale going on as the parentless boys fashion mythology and then are confronted with reality. If Hermie's initiation is set in tragedy, a confusing mix of lust and pity and what feels like a stunning transcendent rite, Oscy's banging gratification leaves him whingeing and as malcontent as a grownup: Hermie has met love and responsibility, Oscy is learning how to manage a supply of body parts.

I refer to the book primarily as the film adapts it very faithfully to the screen. To look at the title sequence now, a slow slideshow of life on the island as Michel Legrand's wistful score tinkles along you might think you're in for a Hallmark reminiscence. Then there's the voiceover: "when I was fifteen and my family came to the island for the summer ..." It's the exact Waltons style smooth-over that launched a million coming-of-age epics for screens of any size. But the first dialogue is competitive, collaborative and on the only subject that most of it will be throughout the running time. This is a coming of age story but its focus on what drives that part of the rites of passage hits the mark: these boys might come across as horny kids but their built for purpose speech renders them into cyborgs.

That's not to say that this is a swing between setnimentalism and science. If Hermie's obssession with the adult Dorothy feels like adolescent idolatry his hilariously clumsy attempts at sounding grown up undercut the worship going uncriticised. If Oscy's boisterous hormonal explosions seem like youth running wild there is also a mechanical feel to him. The sense that he cross as many bridges to adulthood as he likes but he's still going to wander the earth until his control buttons wear out or stick. If Dorothy is the goddess in the castle by the sea she is also a person who lives in a house day by day. The teenage girls Aggie and Miriam are neither pushovers or teasers but individuals. And if the soft focus and dreamy theme music feel like a French New Wave piece the influence of the war within the boys and the one thundering beyond the horizon bring it out of danger.

Last night was the first time I'd seen the film in full and I'd been expecting a soft serve apology for male entitlement but I kept wondering what it would have felt like to watch at around fifteen (which I was a few years after the release date) when the frustration in Hermie and Oscy would have been matched by my own. Honestly, while I would have recognised the improbability of Hermie's path I would have accepted it as an ideal, I would have been watching Oscy and anticipating my own iteration of it, given time and circumstances. My own conversations were not just about sex but it wasn't ever far from the chat and my imagined anatomy and mechanics would have delighted the likes of Salvador Dali and Hieronymous Bosch. 

The adult voice that adds the opening and closing narration might seem like needless schmaltz, given all of this, but it reminds us that we are witnessing a memory with all its nostalgic numbered colouring and smoothed jags: if it seems sentimental here there is a clear sense given of the unease that demands the sheen. And that's the worse thing: if I then also imagine the kind of authoritative narration I would provide for my own version of this as I fashioned the awkwardness, clumsiness, fear and anxiety that led eventually to some form of ease, how would I say these guiding statements to relax anyone at all for the tale? How would you? Yeah, same: keep the focus soft and the music sighing, you can get to the tough stuff easier and still face the mirror the next day.

1971@50: THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS

In a year that boasts Harold and Maude as well as A New Leaf and Little Murders we could be forgiven for thinking that we'd exhausted the violent inversion of the rom com tally for the twelvemonth. Then comes They Might be Giants. Justin Fairplay has been struck so profoundly by the atrocities he has known as a judge and then the death of his wife that he has fled into another identity, presenting himself as Sherlock Holmes. His brother, after control of Justin's fortune, seeks to have him put into lifelong care. Cue the entrance of psychiatrist (a Dr Watson ... you knew that had to be it, didn't you?) and one of the funnier meet cutes you're likely to see if you're coursing through the history of romantic comedies: Justin draws a voice from a non speaking patient at the clinic through deduction. Watson is on the case and the rest could go into inspiration or slowly deflate into indulgent whackiness.

Happily, while neither quite happens, the best of this film sustains what lets down later imitators like Michael, Little Miss Sunshine, or Wes Anderson's entire output: the darkness in the depths. Justin's condition is the product of the stress from witnessing the worst of humanity and what would have felt like the unfairness of his wife's death. All the whimsy and quirk his Holmes expresses and enacts come from the futile wish to solve and repair the cruelty of the world around him. The suggestion that he is destined for a life of chemical stupor is as constant as the memento mori of Harold and Maude, the threat of homicide in A New Leaf and the social entropy of Little Murders: They Might be Giants is anchored. This is what allows the constant loopiness of Justin's pursuit to find its comedy rather than have it stamped clumsily on the surface, and it is why the scenes of painful, torpid self realisation do not feel like they come from nowhere.

But none of this would work if the fragility of the thread binding the two leads snapped or was too thin to hold. George C. Scott, fresh from his barnstorming turn as Patton plays Justin and his protean identity phasing with a real sense of danger, as though one admission or pretence too far and he really would slip into psychic perdition. In his character's approximation of a posh British accent (as distinct from the actor's) he demands that other characters stop indulging and patronising him as they play along and there the plummy tones crack and the stony demeanour falls, if only for a second at a time as though it were a slipping beret. Perhaps it's the vulnerability but Scott, here at fifty-one, looks younger than he did in Dr Strangelove, seven years before. Perhaps it was the actor's own sense of liberation in this once-only performance.

As his foil, a frankly aging Joanne Woodward plays resistance and a careful play at dominance over her patient before understanding that her journey is towards clarity, self-acceptance and potential. As composed as she begins, there is a palpable bitter relief when she tries the phrase, "I am adequate." As she is given example after example of this force of life drawing invigorating rebellion from switchboard operators, security guards, cops and anyone else they encounter, she gradually understands that for all her professionalism her own time is slated to be soon. By the time they are leading their army of quirky desperados to meet what must surely be a great void of disappointment, she is front and centre, still herself but given to a cause. Beside Scott's rampaging turn Woodward's is a thankless task of making us believe in his charisma and, in effect, be the Watson, but it bears close attention and rewards.

Neither as bleak nor as screamingly funny as the trio I've mentioned a few times here, They Might be Giants yet holds its own as a piece of cinematic civil disobedience. Its immediate ancestors like Barefoot in the Park leaned away from middle America. By 1971 this was a grinding rejection of the endless war and the cloud of Richard Nixon. A judge whose professional life breaks him into pastiche which, as strong as it gets, cannot withstand the grounding of reason against the world that must break through. Without the initial indulgence and then a grave and courageous nod of support by his Watson he would be the Don Quixote he invokes to give the film its title (windmills and giants) but he becomes the Holmes he needed to be.

PS - I struggled to find this film through various channels until I stumbled on it while making up an order for videos on an online shop. There is a decent blu-ray for under ten bux at JB.

PPS - This disc is missing a scene. Reading about the film I've found that most subsequent presentations of it have omitted a scene I thought crucial enough to remember vividly and anticipated seeing again when I pressed play. We only see the beginning of it when Justin and Mildred walk into the after hours supermarket with the surly checkout teen and tranced out announcer murmuring about the specials. From what I've read this is difficult to find so I'm going to spoil it. This is the second last scene and serves as the climax. The pursuers of Justin and Watson track him to the shop and make a move on the pair. Justin creates a diversion   by announcing specials that no one can pass up so the teams of heavies heads for the shelves as the mistfit army storms in, creating chaos. I remember it was hilarious when I saw it and the perfect cap on all the whimsy that could veer too close to cute. I worried that it might not match up to my memory. When I realised we were not going to get it I felt more upset than if it had disappointed. It meant that the big march in the third act really was for nothing, that all that anti-normal energy just blew away in the breeze. It also robs the eerie quiet of the final moment by the absence of its noise. The excision takes a few minutes off the running time but it wasn't exactly an overstayer to begin with at just ninety-eight minutes. I'll be on the look out for a restored version. Still, this was a refreshing revisit for something I'd only ever seen after midnight on an old black white tv from the Salvos. Anway....

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.