Wake In Fright (1971; Ted Kotcheff) has all the
elements of a B-movie exploitation flick—a visitor to an remote town must deal
with the place’s strange and foreboding customs—but wisely never plunges into
obvious horror-movie territory.
There’s nothing supernatural going on, nor any superfluous
“crime” subplots that are supposed to jack up the action.
However, Wake In
Fright is a vicious anthropological study of the Australian continent’s
worst citizens, both rural and urban, and as such is a top-shelf entry into a
specific segment of “feel-bad” Savage Cinema.
Not quite Ozploitation, the
film is a definite influence on the sub-genre, being unrelenting in its
intensity once it gets going. BTW, I think I prefer Wake In Fright’s alternate title “Outback:” it’s more direct and
pointed, brutal.
(Interestingly enough, Wake In Fright was originally released around the same time as
Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout—a different
look at Australia, one that’s more spiritual-philosophical, but that’s perhaps
as critical.)
I think your “regular” grindhouse flick would have had
its main character be much more sympathetic—
Wake In Fright shows its B-movie disinclinations
by stacking the deck against the protagonist from the beginning: when we first
see him he’s keeping his students in their seats in class until the final
minutes—on the last day of school before the Christmas holiday! You can’t help
but think, “This prick’s got something
coming to him…”
Hardly an everyman, John (Gary Bond) is the snobbish
and conceited schoolteacher at an isolated outback town, and he cannot wait for
Xmas break to start so he can get out of the isolated place and holiday in
Sydney with his sexy girlfriend (who is shown in flashbacks). He’s Australian,
but hides any Aussie accent, and keeps talking about leaving for England.
To catch his flight to “the city,” John has to spend
the night in the snoozeville factory and farming community of “Yabba,” and it’s
here where he runs into trouble, gambling away all his money (in an attempt to
get enough bread to buy himself out of his teaching contract), and stranding
himself in the process.
The desert town is so low-rent that the “big game at
the casino” is betting on whether the pennies come up heads or tails.
John’s contemptuousness and arrogance of the locals
doesn’t really endear him to many, but their drunken hospitality (bordering on
hooliganism) allows him some entry.
But even so, the “city mouse” cannot deal with the
earthly, violent and carnal townsfolk (who have a staggering capacity to consume beer).
However subconsciously, John almost never misses an
opportunity to slight, routinely turning down offers to drink or bond with the burly
males—and when he gets a chance with a willing local nympho, he blows chunks,
and burns another bridge.
Open-armed outback camaraderie, on the other hand,
keeps allowing the local Alpha-males to let John join in their games—which includes
slaughtering kangaroos (in what, for a film released in 1970, must have been
extremely disturbing stuff—Peckinpah wouldn’t be shooting the heads off of live
chickens until 1973, and Cannibal
Holocaust was still a decade away).
The inevitable, ego-destroying clash of cultures
occurs, and John may never leave his in-the-middle-of-nowhere outpost again…
The film is aided by an occasionally schizoid/hallucinatory editing scheme, and impressive camerawork: lots of high-speed
film used, so there’s plenty of grain—always
a plus! Meanwhile, the production design is perfect.
The dust, grime and background details all seem right, with non-professionals
as extras adding to the documentary-style realism.
Donald Pleasance is excellent as “Doc,” an educated
alky medico who’s gone “native,” and the rest of the cast, all Australians, is
also good, especially the townspeople who can inspire dread with a smile.
This is really one of Pleasance’s best perfs, very physical
and vital (usually he gets typecast as the bloodless deskbound bureaucrat), up
there with his turns in the equally offbeat/non-mainstream Cul-De-Sac in 1966*, and the ultraviolent and nasty Soldier Blue in 1970.
Wake in Fright probably really resonates
with Aussies more than Yanks, what with John’s posh “non”-Oz accent: how many
city-dwelling Australians pretend they have nothing to do with their country
cousins and avoid them like the plague?
In that respect, the film is like John Boorman’s Deliverance, but without the Hollywood
need for externalized conflict, or “plot” (someone’s out to get them!). Wake in Fright is what would happen if
Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight and Co. had gone drinking and partying with the
banjo-playing retard and his kin instead of risking the wrath of the river.
(Not that some cornholing wouldn’t still happen, but under slightly different circumstances…)
Considered “lost” since initial release, Wake In Fright is back in a new print and making the art-house circuit. The
mainstream press is rightfully touting this flick, but to those Ivy
League-High-Brow-Echo-Chamber-Snobs, Wake
In Fright is something new—but horror fans should be warned: there’s
nothing here you haven’t seen before.
It’s still a sick, fucked-up flick, very recommended—but
maybe as a rental (save your dough; times are tough)—and certainly not to be
viewed as a “standard” horror film.
This film is an intellectual exercise that is willing
to go the distance—like a
proto-Michael Haneke movie, Wake in
Fright is what would happen if Konrad Lorenz and Joseph Conrad joined
forces to do a survey on Australia, circa 1970.
[And thank Cthulhu for the “Australian Invasion” of
the 1980s, when Paul Hogan made all things Oz ubiquitous in the States;
otherwise, I would not have understood half
of what the people were saying in Wake In
Fright, their accents are that thick.]
* = Regarding Cul-De-Sac—
Cul-De-Sac (1966; Roman Polanski) Polanski channels Orson
Welles for the visuals while the script is Samuel Beckett meets Harold Pinter
at Jim Thompson’s favorite bar.
Impotent haywire Donald Pleasance is pleasantly tortured
by ill-fated chanteuse Francoise Dorléac, as well as roughed up by a snarling
gangster on the run.
Didn’t watch this under the best circumstances; need to
give the flick another chance, I suppose.
But Kim Morgan loves it—here’s her review.
But speaking of Polanski and his films, LERNER
INTERNATIONAL recently had the pleasure of screening his most recent release:
Carnage (2011; Roman Polanski) is almost perfect—it just
ended too abruptly for me.
Honestly, it could’ve even used a “third act.” After
being so “theatrical” (the characters do not speak like real people; but that’s
okay: the dialog sparkles like shiny daggers—“Children suck the life out of you!” shrieks one character—and it is
wonderful to follow the twists and trails of the insults and venom), the
quasi-post-modern “blackout” ending seems unfortunate.
If the show had been a genuine improvisational comedy
show, then where the story “blacks out” would have been perfect.
But it is
scripted, and with the amount of excellent verbiage, I as an audience member expected
just a little more. (I’m not sure
what, specifically, would help—without devolving the film into something
typical and trite, but I do feel something
is lacking…)
Speaking of improv comedy, I swear Jodie Foster is
channeling Amy Poehler for her character of an uptight mom; but the entire cast
is great, thesping to the max. Meanwhile, Polanski (who cameos as a peeping neighbor)
keeps the camera mobile and the editing nimble. And despite being baffled by
the ending, I really enjoyed this one-location social satire taking place in
real time.
[One distraction, but not really the film’s fault per
se: Knowing that because of his legal problems, Polanski could not have made
this film, set in a tonier part of Brooklyn, on location, whenever any
character got close to a window or looked out one, I was aware that what was
behind them was a highly-detail, well-crafted special effect. The visuals
themselves are flawless, but the knowledge that they were illusions was
distracting. In this case, old school painted backdrops would’ve been more
appropriate, with the obvious artifice encouraging the suspension of disbelief.]
Meanwhile, since we’re discussing Roman P., let’s look at the other film from 1968 that Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby producer, William Castle, was working on:
Project X (1968; William Castle) is a dumb-headed,
cheapo espionage flick. Set in the future, and rife with neat ideas and
potential, the movie suffers from a clunky script that could’ve used about
three or four rewrites and polishes: It’s a proto-Philip K. Dick tale
about a comatose spy, and the government scientists playing with his sense of
reality to get to the info locked in his brain.
The flick is full of groovy psychedelic imagery
(courtesy of Hanna-Barbera animation), but they’re for naught as the story is
so pedestrian and often nonsensical.
If anything, the exposition-heavy Project X is annoying in its mediocrity.
What’s surprising is that producer-director William
Castle was in the process of producing the classic Rosemary’s Baby at the same time he was making this! Too bad he
didn’t get Polanski to pitch in and improve Project
X.
There is, however, a cool “brain in a jar” scene in Project X that I found amusing.
No comments:
Post a Comment