WAKE IN FRIGHT
Broadcasting 9.30 pm on ABC2 (digital) (Channel 22)
Wake in Fright, the lost classic which was at the forefront of Australia's cinematic renaissance in the early 1970s, is now fully restored and will have its Australian premiere at the Sydney Film Festival on Saturday 13 June, prior to a national (and New Zealand) cinema release through Madman Entertainment.
Wake in Fright made its first appearance at the Cannes Film Festival, in competition in 1971. This critically acclaimed landmark Australian film challenged the way Australians saw themselves and their environment. Based on the novel by Kenneth Cook and directed by Ted Kotcheff (Rambo, First Blood), Wake in Fright starred the late Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond and Chips Rafferty (in his last feature film role) and marked the first feature film appearance of a young Jack Thompson. Wake in Fright follows a young outback schoolteacher whose eagerly anticipated summer holiday becomes an alcohol-fuelled descent into violence and despair.
The film of Wake in Fright was long-believed lost until Anthony Buckley traced the original negatives to a vault in America marked for destruction.
The film elements, later determined to be in poor state, were safely recovered and shipped back to Australia by the NFSA with the assistance of Ausfilm. With careful archival matching of the negative components, Wake in Fright has since been digitally restored to pristine condition by Atlab/Deluxe and the NFSA
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http://www.urbancinefile.com.au/home/view.asp?a=15653&s=news_filesWake In Fright
Rated M
Review by David Stratton
John Grant, (GARY BOND) is a schoolteacher bonded to the NSW Education Department and assigned to a tiny school in a remote community in the far west of the state.
While returning to Sydney for the Christmas summer break, he stops overnight at Bundayabba, popularly known as The Yabba, where he discovers that the friendliness and the hospitality of the locals, led by local cop Jock Crawford, (CHIPS RAFFERTY), has a decidedly sinister side to it.
Having lost all his money in a two-up game, Grant finds himself stranded in The Yabba and accepts the invitation of Tim Hynes, (AL THOMAS), to stay with him and his daughter Janette, (SYLVIA KAY). Among Hynes’s mates are Dick, (JACK THOMPSON) and Joe, (PETER WHITTLE). Grant also meets Doc, (DONALD PLEASENCE) who seems to have an agenda of his own.
The film version of Kenneth Cook’s scathing novel premiered in competition at Cannes in May, 1971, and was released in Australia later that year, though it failed to find a substantial audience despite critical support.
After years in which it was unavailable, a newly restored copy is enjoying a short re-release before it goes to DVD – I sincerely hope on Blu-Ray as well as standard DVD - and it’s just as remarkable as ever it was.
The book was published in 1961, and Joseph Losey was originally to have made it with Dirk Bogarde in the lead: that would have been a very different film from the one Canadian Ted Kotcheff made, but Kotcheff – a brief visitor to Australia – was able to pick up on all the menace many people find in outback Australia where, in this reading, a mindless brutality is caused by the almost fanatical adherence to mateship and manliness.
Stunningly photographed by Brian West and impeccably edited by Tony Buckley – the horrific kangaroo shoot is a masterpiece of assembly – the film still shocks and startles.
GARY BOND’s Grant is a bit of a blank page, but that suits the role; DONALD PLEASENCE makes the disgustingly seedy Doc, a genuinely strange character and everyone else in the cast is superb.
Best of all is that Aussie icon, CHIPS RAFFETY who brings such menace to the role of the friendly cop. Sadly, Chips died in May, 1971, just after the Cannes screening and before the film was generally released
http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s2590361.htm
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