The opening shot of Ted Kotcheff’s psychological drama Wake in Fright is an ominous 360-degree pan of the Australian outback, a cracked and infertile ground still haunted by the country’s bloody colonial past. As the camera slowly revolves, recording the vast and debilitating emptiness, Kotcheff signals that his film will be intrinsically tied to its setting. The landscape may seem nondescript, but it quickly becomes the natural backdrop for a story of two men whose mutually destructive relationship evokes mankind’s most brutal tendencies.
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When Wake in Fright competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1971, those in attendance are said to have responded positively (among them was Martin Scorsese, who claims to have loved the film even as it disturbed him). Yet the movie flopped at home, where audiences reportedly found it exploitative. In Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, Graham Shirley and Brian Adams speculate that Wake in Fright was “too uncomfortably direct and uncompromising to draw large Australian audiences.” It paints an unsavory and disparaging picture of Australian culture, and the fact that it was directed by a Canadian and starred a pair of Brits didn’t help (though it’s worth noting that the source material was a novel by Australian writer Kenneth Cook).
In the Yabba, Grant is befriended by a local policeman, Jock Crawford (legendary Aussie actor Chips Rafferty in his final role), who offers him a copious amount of beer before introducing him to a large group of men playing two-up, a popular Australian game in which two coins are tossed into the air and players bet on whether they’ll land heads, tails, or mixed. Grant joins the game and, much to his surprise and elation, hits a hot streak. Well lubricated and hoping to win enough money to pay off his debt, he bets everything he’s got on a single flip but loses his shirt and, unable to leave town, becomes dependent on the aggressive hospitality of the locals, who condition him to their brutish lifestyle.
Ultimately Wake in Fright becomes a kind of Conradian parable of a man succumbing to the wild. Given its raw, pointed depiction of human behavior, one can see why it was overlooked for so long. A fiery marathon of beer, sweat, and blood, it exposes how precarious our notions of civilization can be when the natural environment overtakes us. Push a man too far, Kotcheff suggests, and you’ll find the beast concealed behind the mask of propriety.
Directed by Ted Kotcheff
