Review: Wake in Fright

Gary Bond plays a genteel city schoolteacher assigned to a small school in Tiboonda, a remote outback town. It’s now the holidays and Bond wants to get to Sydney to meet up with his girlfriend at the beach. In order to do this he must first travel to nearby mining town Bundayabba, AKA ‘The Yabba’ to catch his flight. This is a town of outward cheerfulness and hospitality, including that of local cop Chips Rafferty, but something not-quite right seems to be bubbling just beneath the surface. Unfortunately, Bond soon becomes addicted to the popular Aussie gambling game of ‘two-up’ (still played in Australia every Anzac Day) and loses all of his funds and therefore stranded in ‘The Yabba’. He’s taken in by Al Thomas’s buxom (but rather ‘handsome’, to be charitable) daughter Sylvia Kay, and he’s also introduced to Thomas’ loutish mates including Dick (Jack Thompson), and Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence), a medical practitioner who has settled into a life of alcoholism in ‘The Yabba’. Lots of drinking, screwing (Kay gets around like nobody’s business!), gambling, brawling, and kangaroo shooting ensue as Bond finds that getting to Sydney is the least of his problems. He’s first got to survive ‘The Yabba’. John Meillon (“Crocodile Dundee”) turns up at the beginning as a surly bartender.

First up, let me just say that I’m an Aussie, and so my views on “Wake in Fright” are going to be even more different to many others than usual. Whilst I believe this review can be easily understood by anyone, I’ll probably be throwing out terms and references (if I haven’t already) that are mostly intended for an Aussie understanding and might be lost on everyone else. Sorry, but I can’t change things without ruining the expression of my overall understanding an analysis of the film. So please bear that in mind, I’m pretty sure it will only be a minor issue if an issue at all. There’s no wonder that this outback nightmare film (indeed, the international title is the generic “Outback”) is regarded as a ‘lost classic’. Long thought to be unavailable, it was rediscovered in the last decade and given a revival of-sorts in Australia in 2009. It’s an exposé on parts of (if not great chunks of) the Aussie culture, especially the boozy ‘mateship’ motif that is still quite prevalent today. However, two things about this film almost guaranteed commercial failure in Australia on first release; 1) It does not paint this segment of Aussie culture in a remotely positive light, in fact it’s downright terrifying. 2) The director, Ted Kotcheff (“The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz”, “First Blood”, “Weekend at Bernie’s”), is a Canadian, and us Aussies sure as shit don’t want to have some hoity-toity foreigner coming over here and telling us we’re a pack of beer-guzzling, brawling, thugs and creeps. A lost film? Yeah, I bet it was deliberately lost. And that’s a shame, because Kotcheff has captured if not the Australian culture (As a Cultural Studies student, I still maintain we don’t officially have an overriding culture), he’s dead-on captured certain parts of it, and shown us the dangers (and inherent imbecility) of going too far with this whole boozy, macho bonding stuff. It’s more effective than many horror films I’ve seen, though being a non-drinker (Bias admission, deal with it!), I’m probably pre-disposed to fear of drunken louts with guns, than the Average Aussie out there. At times, I almost felt like I was watching a documentary, and the film is just as relevant now as it was back in the 70s (and this is not just a rural Australia thing, either, our football codes are rife with drunken, misogynistic louts), so I’m glad that it has finally been rediscovered and is relatively widely available.

Despite its Canadian director and a few British actors (notably lead Bond and legendary character actor Pleasence), this is definitely an Aussie film and easily one of the best of the 1970s, if not all-time. Many still see Brit Gary Bond’s casting as a flaw, or at best, a shameless attempt at commercialism (not that Bond was ever a star here or anywhere else for that matter), but for me, his posh accent and Peter O’Toole lookalike features make him perfect as a genteel, unaccustomed to the outback way of life. Besides, no one complains about fellow Brit Donald Pleasence being here, do they? And if you pay even the slightest bit of attention, there are hints that Bond’s character is meant to be British anyway, as he talks of London specifically at one point. I’m not a hundred percent certain (please inform me one way or the other if you have any idea), but I’d suggest he’s merely a resident of Sydney or merely taking a vacation there with his girlfriend. I’ll admit, though, that if this casting was an attempt at reaching a broader audience, it is a failure, because Bond is not, nor was he ever, a marquee star. He’s also not a particularly charismatic leading man, but I’d argue he pretty much gets the job done anyway. More impressive is fellow Brit Donald Pleasence as the displaced (and presumably British) city doctor who has relocated to the Yabba and become accustomed if not enthusiastically adoptive of the aggressively macho way of life. Given his well-known love of the drink, one does wonder if this film didn’t start Pleasence on his little drinking ‘hobby’. In this film he shows why he was always regarded as a scenery-chewer par excellence, even if I could’ve gone through life without having ever seen him with his shirt off. Pleasence’s Doc is a disgusting and pathetic creature, but shirtless Doc is the most frightening image of all!

Getting back to the themes, I really do believe this film is brilliantly unnerving in its depiction of the ‘ocker’ Aussie culture (and possible criticism of it) that as I’ve said, still exists in some parts of Australia today. Nearly everything about these characters is a little off-kilter in a sinister way, and it stops just short of being a parody so that you can’t even have a laugh and get comfortable. Legendary Aussie star Chips Rafferty (who was more ‘ocker’ than Paul Hogan and Steve ‘Crikey!’ Irwin combined) is ostensibly playing a ‘good bloke’, a copper, but even he comes off as just a little too intimidating for one to feel comfortable with his presence. He’s chuckling and affable, but he’s not really a ‘good bloke’, at all, despite not once doing anything overtly sinister. Mind you, I knew I was in for trouble when John Meillon (in fine form, I might add) turned up in the first scene as a rather disagreeable bartender. That’s never a good omen. A young-ish Jack Thompson is also made to be a bit intimidating as a beer-guzzling, roo-shooting ‘boofhead’. He’s smiling on the outside, but clearly the guy’s a no-good thug.

Most importantly, the film gives a sinister and aggressive edge to the supposedly ‘hospitable’ nature of these outback characters who are always quick to offer you a beer, but turn aggressively suspicious towards anyone who dares refuse their hospitality. You can’t refuse a beer, mate, that’s un-Australian! And believe me, it’s only a slight exaggeration of the truth in some quarters of Australia. To refuse a beer seems to be a refusal or insult to some people’s conception of the Aussie way of life. I’ve never been terribly moralistic about my non-drinker status, I just don’t like the taste nor see the fascination in it, but I have to say this film did start to form a moralistic stance within me. I really do believe, and this film illustrates it, that Australia has taken the beer-swilling, knockabout Aussie stuff a little too far over the years and we see its negative effects even today with this aggressive behaviour and near-endorsement of alcohol consumption (and predominantly drinking to excess) as a kind of rite of passage for predominantly males. It’s ingrained in our psyches that having a beer or ten and getting a little drunk and silly is something everyone must experience at some point in their life, let alone something that well into adulthood they should be actively practising on a regular basis, be it at sporting events, New Years, or average every day parties. Hell, Dame Edna’s alter-ego Barry Humphries created the personification of red-faced, disgustingly loutish inebriation with his Sir Les Patterson character, who has become somewhat of a national treasure (which is strange, because us Aussies are usually better at spotting irony than say, Americans). I’m not saying I want alcohol banned (I could care less, it doesn’t affect me personally), I’m just saying that in Australia it’s ingrained from an early age that drinking alcohol- even in excess- is relatively normal and ultimately acceptable behaviour and forms a large part of the culture if not the entire lives of many people. This film shows how this notion of alcohol consumption as culture can have a dangerous and sinister underbelly, especially when drinking in excess. Do we really want this as our image? I certainly don’t, and I’d ask anyone of Aussie heritage who thinks I’m overreacting to simply watch this movie and tell me I don’t have a damn point.

And this is clearly a reason for the film’s controversial status in Australia, though there’s another big reason that is somewhat tied into all of this anyway. It has to do with the film’s infamous ‘roo shoot’ scene, wherein a sloshed Bond accompanies Pleasence, Thompson and co, on a drunken late-night hunt (nee slaughter!) of some seriously frightened kangaroos. This is real footage taken during a Government-approved culling exercise, and it will prove extremely traumatic for sensitive viewers. Hell, even I winced several times. Kotcheff did this deliberately to show the inhumanity and cruelty of killing animals for exporting purposes. Not only does Jack Thompson run over “Skippy” (the beloved old Aussie TV show about a crime-solving kangaroo), but Kotcheff and his expert editor Anthony Buckley (Michael Powell’s “Age of Consent”) create a truly nauseating experience that almost single-handedly made me feel ashamed to be an Aussie. And like everything else in the film, this scene makes for truly uncomfortable, unnerving viewing as Kotcheff shows us the sinister flip-side to the two-up playing, beer-drinking, larrikin Aussie persona several decades before “Wolf Creek”. The funny thing is, though, I bet there’s plenty of people out there who think this film is about some rude pommy bloke who doesn’t wanna have a beer.

I think the reason why Kotcheff gets away with this depiction (aside from the fact that it’s not far from the truth!) is because we all know this isn’t just an Aussie thing. All cultures have this ridiculously macho, aggressive and inhumane element and an over-indulgence in alcohol that heightens everything. The equation is just as true in the US as it is in Australia: beer + aggressive males + hunting= a loss of humanity and often a destruction of nature’s wonders, if not national emblems.

If the film has a flaw it’s that the whole ‘stuck in a dead-end town he can’t escape from despite several attempts’ is not really in keeping with the rest of the film. Yes, the entire film is somewhat nightmarish, but it’s the one element in the film that took me out of my engrossment with the story and characters, and made me realise I was just watching a movie. Everything else, skewed or not, seemed far more realistic than this aspect, which seemed like something out of “Red Rock West” or “U-Turn” (both coming long after this, admittedly) and was a bit old hat anyway, even for an early 70s film. Good, oddball score by John Scott (“The Adventures of Barry McKenzie”, “Newsfront”, “Sexy Beast”, “Rabbit-Proof Fence”) adds to the off-kilter vibe of the film itself. The screenplay is by Evan Jones (“The Killing of Angel Street”, “These Are the Damned”), from the Kenneth Cook novel, and apparently quite a faithful adaptation.

Rating: A-