From the archive: "Wake in Fright"

Some films are so ferocious they refuse to sit around getting dusty in the archives for too long; by sheer force of personality, they endure, and eventually go swaggering back out into the world, looking for trouble once again. After four decades in lock-up – possibly at the behest of the Australian Tourist Board – Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 horror-cum-national character study Wake in Fright returns to UK screens this weekend, off the back of a recent Cannes restoration, to offer its own unique and bloody-minded tour of the Outback.

The Canadian Kotcheff got here around the same time as Nic Roeg went Walkabout, yet where the latter recast this territory as another Eden, Kotcheff’s interest was more grounded (and, in some way, more comprehensible) yet: in a place where there’s nothing to do except get royally lashed, and a fellow is judged chiefly on his ability to neck a pint. (I drink, therefore I am: one of the reasons the film endures so is its resemblance to the aggressive dipsomania still prevalent in certain British backwaters.)

On trial here is one John Grant (Gary Bond), an Englishman who’s wound up, somewhat resentfully, in a middle-of-nowhere town on a teaching secondment. Of course this educated man believes himself above the locals, with their gruff militarism, arcane gambling rituals and steaks for a dollar. And of course, this certainty will be removed from him when he tries to get away from it all over the Christmas holidays, eroded by a combination of alcohol, bad luck and that familiar 70s harbinger of insanity Donald Pleasance.

During its absence from general circulation, the film has found itself lumped in with that Ozploitation cycle documented in 2008’s enjoyably rowdy Not Quite Hollywood, yet in itself Wake in Fright is far more lingering than any of those movies turned out for a quick buck. Kotcheff seems determined to hold his camera on every strange, unsettling, telling gesture and each loaded exchange, and the result is almost abstract: a portrait of a figure slowly dissolving into his surrounds, as though he were no more than a temporary heat haze.

Or some other haze, for it isn’t blood that flows through these frames, but the amber nectar. The sound of tinnies being opened becomes a prelude to gunfire, and you can sense the film developing a bad head before you – a fogginess of a kind a breakfast of kangaroo stew only worsens, through which only a bullet might really pierce. The action, however, remains joltingly vivid: a game of coinflipping that becomes as much a self-abusing ritual as the Russian roulette in The Deer Hunter, a brutal kangaroo hunt in which everybody starts blasting away at the thin tissue of civilities separating John Grant from his true nature.

In between, Kotcheff does something haunting and critical with the film’s women, who’ve long learnt to keep their mouths shut and shrug off every horny-handed slap on the arse. Yet, clearly, we’re mired firmly in man’s territory: the film keeps weighing some of the most believable drunken-destructive scraps ever recorded outside of provincial nightclub CCTV footage against those mornings-after when its characters awaken, in puddles of their own drool, sweat and filth, surrounded by strange bodies, and wondering what the XXXX just happened.

Punctuated at regular intervals by editor Anthony Buckley’s choice, suggestive blackouts, Wake in Fright re-emerges as a real hangover-movie, one that can’t easily be slept off; however physical Kotcheff got in his later, more scattershot work – which took in the agonised chest-thumping of First Blood and the knockabout of Weekend at Bernie’s – he never quite matched this one for potency.

(MovieMail, March 2014)

A 4K restoration of Wake in Fright opens in selected cinemas from Friday.