Wake in Fright (1971) – Film Review

Director: Ted Kotcheff
Cast: Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond, Chips Rafferty
Certificate:

By Sarah Morgan

G’day mate! Fancy a bruising encounter with one of the key entries in the Australian New Wave movement? If so settle down with a tinny and some sangers off the barbie before watching Wake in Fright – but brace yourself, because it offers a far more brutal insight into life Down Under than, say, Home and Away or Neighbours.

While the latter’s theme song memorably declared that neighbours can be good friends, the community depicted in Ted Kotcheff’s hard-hitting movie probably isn’t one you would want to join.

Young English, middle-class schoolteacher John Grant is certainly a reluctant part of it. In return for having his education paid for by the government, he’s been sent to a remote Outback school where he clearly has nothing in common with his young charges.

During the Christmas holidays John plans to visit Sydney to meet up with his girlfriend Robyn. However, he never gets there – instead, during a stopover in a nearby mining town, he becomes involved in two-up, an illegal form of gambling. Initially he wins, and is on the verge of having enough cash to pay off the government, allowing him to return to the UK, when he loses the lot.

“Disturbing insights”

Now trapped in the area, he seeks employment and is taken under the wing of a local resident, has an ill-fated encounter with his daughter, and then moves in with Doc, an alcoholic former medical practitioner living in a rundown shack in the middle of nowhere.

Doc and his loutish friends take John on a terrifying kangaroo hunt, after which they drunkenly smash up a bar. But it’s what happens afterwards, involving an inebriated, sexually ambivalent Doc that threatens to push John to the very edge of his sanity.

Although largely ignored on its initial release, Wake in Fright is now regarded as a cult classic, and rightly so – its depiction of Outback life might not have gone down well with some of those living there, but it offers disturbing insights into the male psyche when it’s allowed to fester without the balance offered by female company or the constraints of ‘normal’ society.

In an overheated atmosphere (you can almost feel the steam and smell the sweat coming off the screen), the worst excesses of the men come to the surface, with barbaric activities designed to show off just how manly they are commonplace – the depiction of the kangaroo hunt is particularly sickening and disturbing to watch.

“Hostile landscape”

Nevertheless, Kotcheff captures a life one hopes has now come to an end. Certainly an accompanying documentary in which residents of Broken Hill, which was one of the main locations, discuss the shoot suggests life there is far more genteel now.

Gary Bond, looking like a young Peter O’Toole, is excellent as John Grant, and one wonders why he never became a major screen star. However, even he is overshadowed by Donald Pleasence as the leering, sleazy Doc, who somehow manages to survive, like some native insect, in a hostile landscape.

Look out too for Aussie acting legend Chips Rafferty in his final role as a friendly policeman, while Kotcheff’s then-wife, Sylvia Kay, who’s perhaps best known for playing Jan Francis’s mother in Just Good Friends, also appears as the woman with whom John almost has a fling.

Ultimately, Wake in Fright is a searing indictment on toxic masculinity, making it hugely relevant today. It is not, however, for the fainthearted.

Sarah Morgan( Writer )

Sarah Morgan studied film journalism at post-graduate level with the BFI and has been writing about TV and film for PA Media’s newspaper, magazine and new media customers since 1996. She’s also written for a wide range of other publications, both online and in print, including the book Offbeat and Intermission magazine, and is a regular contributor to the Talking Pictures TV podcast. When she isn’t watching movies, she’s collecting and reading vintage crime and horror paperback books or, for her sins, watching her beloved Sheffield Wednesday.

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