Wake in Fright (Outback)

The first Australian-produced film to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival (1971), Ted Kotcheff's "Wake in Fright" was almost lost. All chemical prints from the negative were damaged beyond recognition. In 2004, the film was reproduced digitally from the picture's surviving negative with surprising results -- the film's director and editor, in colloquy on the commentary track, observe that the movie now shows details that were invisible in the chemically developed prints shown around the world forty years ago. "Wake in Fright" is an impressive picture with a disturbing undercurrent of menace. A young schoolteacher in the remote Australian outback dismisses his students for the Christmas holiday and makes his way through the terrific heat and sun of the desert to a small city called Yabby (it's Broken Hill) by its inhabitants. The city is a mining town, packed with men whose idea of fun is drinking themselves into oblivion, gambling, and massacreing kangaroos. The teacher is indentured to the school system -- if he leaves his job at the dull and remote outback station, he has to pay the government $1000 dollars. And, so, after a dozen or so ales(everyone is always forcing drinks on him), he decides to gamble his wages in the hope that he can win enough money to buy-off his bond. The miners play a primitive game involving coin-tossing, "Two-up" and the young man loses everything. Befriended by a little bantam cock of a salesman, the teacher spends several days drinking with the local ruffians and, in one stomach-churning scene, participates in slaughtering a dozen or so kangaroos, the big animals paralyzed by a searchlight shining from the top of a pickup truck. The men fight constantly, belch, hurl bottles through windows and, generally, raise hell. The teacher ends up living in squalid shack where a local doctor, played with sinister aplomb by Donald Pleasance, is squatting. The doctor rapes the teacher when they are both obliterated by booze -- the men wake-up covered with sweat side-by-side on the dirt floor of the shack. Panicked, the young man sets forth, hitchhiking toward Sydney, his destination where he hopes to see his girlfriend. He ends up sleeping in the back of a truck that nightmarishly takes him back to Yabba and his wretched drinking companions in that city. Things go from bad to worse, although the young man survives to return to his isolated outback one-room school. Asked about his six-week Christmas holiday, the teacher says "It was the best." Kotcheff directs this horrific story with simple elegance and documentary-style detail -- the film is remarkably vivid: you can feel the heat, the dust, and the flies. The drinking scenes, comprising most of the film, are astonishingly realistic and frightening. Everyone seems continuously out-of-control and the threat of mayhem is implicit in every scene. The film's subject, the way that men bully and intimidate one another, is an unusual one for a movie and this kind of material is rarely shown with the sort of realistic impact that "Wake in Fright" has -- Westerns, of course, dramatize this same subject, but, generally, in a glamorous style and, usually, with plenty of romance to lubricate the harshness of the material. Yabba is mostly devoid of women and the men have no one to impress but one another, a situation that leads to increasingly desperate and violently futile action. (There is one girl prominent in the film, the sharp-featured daughter of the salesman, and she offers herself sexually to the school-teacher. But he turns away from her too drunk to act and pukes all over the gravel where they are lying.) The footage involving the kangaroo massacre, butchery comitted out of sheer bloodlust, is extraordinarily disturbing and hard to endure -- Kotcheff apparently shot this sequence with professional hunters who gun-down kangaroos to make dog food sold in the USA. The movie has a few missteps -- there is the standard "freak-out" delirium sequence, necessary to all movies made in the late sixties and early seventies -- but, by and large, this is a remarkable film and one that has been undeservedly forgotten in this country. (The Australian film archive financed the restoration of this movie, obviously an act of great devotion Downunder.) At one point, Donald Pleasance says: "To farm here is death, to work in the mines is worse than death, and you expect them to sing opera too...(but) all the little devils are proud of Hell." When the schoolteacher admits to being down and out, the salesman wants to help him as a fellow lodge brother -- "surely you'r a Buff (that is a member of Fraternal Order of the Water Buffalos), no? Or a Free-Mason? No? Then, you must be a Roman Catholic." My wife had an interesting comment on this film, a picture that she refused to watch because of the kangaroo slaughter: "Australia looks like a place where every loser in the world goes...And, I guess, that's historically true -- didn't they ship all the losers there?"