Wake in Fright

Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright, from 1971, is a well crafted slice of rural paranoia set in the Australian Outback. A schoolteacher on holiday gets stuck in a dingy mining town after losing his money gambling. The locals, nearly all lager louts, extend a welcome to join them in their primeval rituals: which involve binge drinking, destruction of property and senseless slaughter of the local wildlife. The film is a fairly explicit critique of so called civilized masculinity, much like films from that era such as A Clockwork Orange, Deliverance, and Straw Dogs.

Wake in Fright suffers from erratic acting. Familiar Aussie types like Chips Rafferty and Jack Thompson fit in nicely as Foster's swilling blokes, but lead actor Gary Bond is a blank. Donald Pleasence is well cast as a creepy, alcoholic doctor, but Sylvia Kay, as a nympho(!), is directed as if she were in a Roger Corman produced Poe adaptation. A spectral woman out of The Tomb of Ligeia or The Fall of the House of Usher would not be out of place in a more fanciful film, but Wake in Fright aspires to be a more existential piece. Kotcheff is able to extract a tactile sense of horror from the film's environment, but his inability to animate his players sometimes makes this film seem like it is an abstract exercise. 

On a cinematographic level, Kotcheff succeeds in evoking the Outback as a squalid Hades. The opening sequence emphasizes horizontal movement in which the protagonist makes a snail's pace through a foreboding landscape. This soon devolves into claustrophobic interior sequences in which the schoolteacher is increasingly encroached upon by the locals. The swarming, male only gambling den becomes a little hell of withing flesh conjuring a sinister homoerotic vibe that culminates in the schoolteacher being violated by the doctor.

That the protagonist returns somewhat unscathed back to his single room schoolhouse brings him full circle in what I found to be a somewhat compelling, yet ultimately pointless film. Kotcheff has made some memorable films, but seems to lack an overall vision. I think he is a tad underrated, he is not listed in David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film for example, but I will make no great claims for him. I've enjoyed The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Fun with Dick and Jane, North Dallas Forty and even Weekend at Bernie's. Wake in Fright is accomplished, but only intermittently. The kangaroo rassling sequences seem particularly ill-judged. All in all, Kotcheff ranks a bit higher on my Canadian auteur scale than Norman Jewison, but only just.