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\u00a9 NLT Productions \/ Group W Films \/ United Artists<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n We\u2019re now in December and, as usual, people are talking about what Christmas movies they\u2019ll be watching on and around December 25th<\/sup>.\u00a0 So here\u2019s a piece \u2013 originally posted on this blog back in 2017 \u2013 about my all-time favourite Christmas movie.\u00a0 It definitely qualifies as a Christmas movie since its events take place during the festive season and against a background of Christmas trees, decorations and carols.\u00a0 Though if you\u2019re accustomed to the cosy festive cheer of It\u2019s a Wonderful Life (1946) or The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), you might not be ready for the squalor, drunkenness, brawling, vandalism, vomit, sweat-stains, flies, kangaroo-slaughter and Donald-Pleasence-going-bananas that constitute the Wake in Fright Christmas experience\u2026\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n It took a while for the 1971 Australian epic Wake in Fright<\/em> to win some respect, but it finally got there in the end.\u00a0 It flopped on its initial release, despite being nominated for the grand prize at that year\u2019s Cannes Film Festival, and for a long time afterwards it only existed in heavily cut and low-quality versions.\u00a0 However, following restoration and remastering work during the noughties, a new version of Wake in Fright<\/em> was shown at Cannes in 2009 and now, belatedly, the film is seen as an important precursor to the New Wave of Australian Cinema that produced the likes of The Cars That Ate Paris<\/em> (1974), Picnic at Hanging Rock<\/em> (1975), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith<\/em> (1978), Mad Max<\/em> (1979), My Brilliant Career<\/em> (1979) and Breaker Morant<\/em> (1980).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Directed by Ted Kotcheff, Wake in Fright<\/em> tells the story of John Grant (Gary Bond), a young Australian schoolteacher beset by frustration and a sense of injustice.\u00a0 He dreams of moving to England, something that many young Australians were doing in real life at the time, most famously Barry Humphries, Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes.\u00a0 There, he muses, he\u2019ll become \u2018a journalist\u2019.\u00a0 It has to be said that for someone wanting to write as a career, he spends suspiciously little of the film, none of it in fact, doing any writing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For now, though, John\u2019s stuck in a school in a tiny Outback settlement surrounded by vast expanses of nothingness.\u00a0 Kotcheff highlights this at the film\u2019s start with a 360-degree panning shot that still looks mightily impressive today.\u00a0 John\u2019s exile here shows no likelihood of ending soon, because to leave his job he needs to pay off a bond signed with the Australian government to cover the costs of his teacher-training.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 NLT Productions \/ Group W Films \/ United Artists<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Wake in Fright<\/em> begins with John finishing his final lesson before the Christmas vacation and taking a train to a mining town called Bundanyabba, where he plans to catch a plane to Sydney for a few weeks in the company of his glamorous city-based girlfriend.\u00a0 But his plans go askew when he arrives in Bundanyabba, \u2018the Yabba\u2019 as it\u2019s known to its inhabitants, and he spends a night there before the plane flies.\u00a0 In succession, John enters a drinking establishment that isn\u2019t so much a pub as a pumping station, supplying the Yabba\u2019s thirsty male citizens with industrial volumes of beer; befriends a hulking policeman called Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty), who takes him to a late-night eatery; discovers a gambling den at the back of the eatery where money is bet, won and lost on the tossing of pairs of coins; gets involved in a game; impulsively bets everything he has in the hope of winning enough to pay off his bond; and loses everything.\u00a0 Thus, the next day, John wakes up penniless, unable to pay for his flight and marooned in the Yabba.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n By this time, he\u2019s also met local eccentric \u2018Doc\u2019 Tydon, who\u2019s played by none other than the great English actor Donald Pleasence.\u00a0 When you see the crazed, drunken Pleasence tossing the pair of coins on which John\u2019s fortunes depend, you know it\u2019s going to end badly.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n After losing all his money, John, who was initially disdainful of the macho, swaggering, hard-drinking, hard-gambling mindset that possesses most of the Yabba\u2019s male inhabitants, gradually sinks to the point where the same mindset possesses him.\u00a0 He\u2019s befriended by a well-to-do man called Tim Hynes (Al Thomas) who brings him home and introduces him to his daughter Janette (Sylvia Kay).\u00a0 Hynes, obviously seen as a soft touch by his Yabba neighbours, soon has a crowd in his living room drinking his beer and leering after Janette, including the ubiquitous Doc Tydon and a pair of young bogans<\/a> called Joe (Peter Whittle) and Dick (future Australian movie star Jack Thompson).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 NLT Productions \/ Group W Films \/ United Artists<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n After a severe all-night drinking session, John, now stained, grubby and worse-for-wear, comes to in Tydon\u2019s shack.\u00a0 This is a hellhole with kangaroo meat heaped in greasy pans and clusters of dead flies stuck to dangling flypaper strips.\u00a0 We don\u2019t get to see the outdoor toilet \u2013 the Donald Pleasence dunny<\/a> \u2013 but from what we hear it\u2019s even more hideous than the shack.\u00a0 It transpires that John drunkenly arranged to go on a kangaroo shoot with Joe and Dick, who soon show up at the shack in a vehicle loaded with guns and booze.\u00a0 All four head into the Outback to hunt \u2019roo and what follows is Wake in Fright<\/em>\u2019s most notorious sequence, wherein the quartet blast away a pack of kangaroos and wrestle with and stab to death the wounded ones.\u00a0 Such is the carnage that even in 2009, during the film\u2019s re-screening in Cannes, a dozen people walked out of it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Now completely deranged, John included, they wreck an Outback pub on their way home.\u00a0 The next day, after waking up in Tydon\u2019s shack in an even worse condition, John manages to stagger off.\u00a0 Appalled by his own degradation, he attempts to hitchhike out of the Yabba and the whole way to Sydney, but again things don\u2019t go according to plan.\u00a0 Finally, despairing and practically psychotic, John hits on another way of escaping from the Yabba, the most drastic way possible\u2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to see why, when Wake in Fright<\/em> was released in 1971, Australian audiences stayed away in droves.\u00a0 With its scenes of heavy-duty and illicit drinking (\u201cClose the door, mate,\u201d someone shouts when John walks into a pub and finds the entire male population of the Yabba boozing inside, \u201cwe\u2019re closed!\u201d) and incessant gambling (men standing robotically at rows of bar \u2018pokies<\/a>\u2019 or acting as a baying mob in a backroom den), and with its depictions of violence, sexism and general macho bullshit, it doesn\u2019t portray Australian culture of the time in a flattering light.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One scene sure to bait 1970s Australian viewers takes place in a pub.\u00a0 The boozers and gamblers suddenly fall silent, stand to attention and face an ANZAC memorial wall-mural while a radio announcer exhorts them to \u2018remember the fallen\u2019.\u00a0 When the silence ends a moment later, they dive back to their beer and slot machines.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 NLT Productions \/ Group W Films \/ United Artists<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the gruelling kangaroo shoot where bullets tear bloodily through what are clearly real animals.\u00a0 That must have traumatised international audiences whose images of Australia in 1971 probably mostly came from the popular, cuddly kids\u2019 TV show Skippy the Bush Kangaroo<\/em><\/a> (1968-70).\u00a0\u00a0 A statement in the film\u2019s end-credits assures us that the kangaroos weren\u2019t<\/em> slaughtered for the film.\u00a0 Rather, Kotcheff and his crew shadowed<\/a> a group of professional \u2019roo hunters one night and filmed the shootings, which would have taken place whether Wake in Fright<\/em> was made or not.\u00a0 Then this documentary footage was spliced into the film.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What the filmmakers did isn\u2019t above criticism, though.\u00a0 It\u2019s been pointed out that the powerful spotlight they used to film the hunt also enabled the hunters to blind and target their prey.\u00a0 Kotcheff later described the experience as a \u2018nightmare\u2019 because, as the night continued, the hunters became drunk, their shooting grew less accurate and kangaroos ended up horribly maimed.\u00a0 Things got so bad that the film crew pretended there\u2019d been a power cut so that the spotlight no longer worked and the shooting had to stop.\u00a0 Most of the footage proved to be so upsetting that Kotcheff decided he couldn\u2019t use it, though what is<\/em> shown is bad enough.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The footage was also shown to the Royal Australian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty for Animals.\u00a0 They actually urged the filmmakers to include it in Wake in Fright<\/em>, hoping it\u2019d spark an outcry and help such madcap hunting to be banned.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Wake in Fright<\/em> is a grim watch, then, but its cast is a pleasure.\u00a0 Gary Bond, with his finely sculpted features, blond hair and sonorous, cultivated voice, achieves a perfect balance between arrogance and vulnerability.\u00a0 He\u2019s priggish but we still worry about him as his situation goes from bad to worse.\u00a0 Also effective are Chips Rafferty as the lugubrious policeman Crawford, who partakes of the roughneck culture around him without overdoing it and views John\u2019s gradual succumbing to it with mixed disdain and concern; Al Thomas as Hynes, good-hearted but, wandering around the Yabba in a costume of fedora, shirt and bowtie, baggy shorts and knee-length white socks, sadly pathetic too; and Sylvia Kay as Hynes\u2019s daughter Janette, whom John discovers is less repressed than she first appears.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 NLT Productions \/ Group W Films \/ United Artists<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n But the true star of Wake in Fright<\/em> is Donald Pleasence.\u00a0 As Doc Tydon, he explains himself thus: \u201cI\u2019m a doctor of medicine and a tramp by temperament.\u00a0 I\u2019m also an alcoholic.\u00a0 My disease prevented me from practising in Sydney but out here it\u2019s scarcely noticeable.\u00a0 Certainly doesn\u2019t stop people from coming to see me.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0I wondered how convincingly the man who played Ernst Stavros Blofeld in You Only Live Twice<\/em> (1967) would appear in the milieu of Wake in Fright<\/em> but Pleasence nails it.\u00a0 He\u2019s perfect whether he\u2019s sober and observing icily how John flinched at the touch of Crawford\u2019s \u2018hairy hand\u2019; or drinking beer whilst standing on his head to demonstrate how the oesophagus muscles are stronger than gravity; or slyly taunting John about the \u2018open\u2019 relationship he enjoys with Janette; or drunkenly raving on a pub-porch about \u2018Socrates, affectability, progress\u2019 being \u2018vanities spawned by fear\u2019 while Joe and Dick punch lumps out of each other behind him.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Wake in Fright<\/em> could be dismissed as an expression of middle-class disdain for the lower-brow culture and less-mannered behaviour of the proletariat, but I feel that\u2019s a misinterpretation.\u00a0 When John complains to Tydon about \u201cthe aggressive hospitality\u201d of the Yabba, and \u201cthe arrogance of stupid people who insist you should be as stupid as they are,\u201d Tydon retorts: \u201cIt\u2019s death to farm out here.\u00a0 It\u2019s worse than death in the mines.\u00a0 You want them to sing opera as well?\u201d\u00a0 And when John slips down the slippery slope, a slope Tydon has already descended, it\u2019s not because he\u2019s had to become a brute to fight off other brutes around him (like in another 1971 movie, Straw<\/em> Dogs<\/em>).\u00a0 In John\u2019s case, he\u2019s entered an environment so harsh and thankless it can turn anyone<\/em> into a brute.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It\u2019s worth noting too that some people whom John encounters on his dark odyssey, like Crawford and Hynes, exhibit more kindness than he does himself.\u00a0 Even Tydon, who at times seems beyond all help, reveals some decency at the end.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Wake in Fright<\/em> will celebrate its 50th<\/sup> anniversary next year, but it\u2019s a film that hasn\u2019t acquired any middle-aged flab or stodginess.\u00a0 It still seems as lean, mean, raw and unsettling as it did to audiences back in 1971.\u00a0 And it\u2019s fitting that Nick Cave, the Victoria-born singer-songwriter and God-like genius whose work has frequently shared Wake in Fright<\/em>\u2019s bleak, brutal worldview, calls<\/a> it ‘the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence’.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 NLT Productions \/ Group W Films \/ United Artists<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a9 NLT Productions \/ Group W Films \/ United Artists We\u2019re now in December and, as usual, people are talking about what Christmas movies they\u2019ll be watching on and around December 25th.\u00a0 So here\u2019s a piece \u2013 originally posted on this blog back in 2017 \u2013 about my all-time favourite Christmas movie.\u00a0 It … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bloodandporridge.co.uk\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/WiF-Poster-225x300.jpg\")
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