In a two-building town in the Australian desert, a young schoolteacher in suit and tie lights a cigarette and orders a beer in an otherwise empty hotel bar. He’s waiting for the afternoon train that will take him on to the next town, from which he plans to fly home to Sydney for the holidays. The surly, rifle-wielding bartender, who turns out to be his landlord, sets down the drink, not bothering to remove a significant head of foam. The teacher raises the glass, eyes the size of the head, and says nothing, while the bartender pours a beer for himself. His own drink, of course, is perfect.
The scene is from “Wake in Fright,” a film directed by Ted Kotcheff, and released in 1971. It is routinely and very justifiably described as “disturbing.” The novelist Peter Temple has joked that it probably set the course of tourism in the country back twenty years. There are culinary horrors, packs of grunting, shirtless frontiersmen getting blotto, and genuine kangaroo-hunt footage. But the film is as subtle as it is brutal, and it was largely the accumulation of casually eloquent little details (like the one above) that left me stunned after a first viewing.
The movie is based on the Kenneth Cook novel from ten years earlier. Cook was from Sydney, but the director of the film, Ted Kotcheff, is Canadian, and its scriptwriter, Evan Jones, is an Anglo-Jamaican who had never been to Australia. The film, starring Gary Bond in the lead role, was well-received by critics abroad, appearing in the U.S. under the generic title “Outback,” and running in Paris for five months. When a young Martin Scorsese first saw it at Cannes, where it was nominated for the Palme d’Or, he is reported to have continually erupted, unable to contain his delight. The response in Australia at the time, though, was much less enthusiastic. For decades the film’s original negative was missing, only to be discovered in Pittsburgh a week before a scheduled incineration. The restored print, completed in 2009, will screen this week at New York’s Film Forum.
The film follows a few days in the life of John Grant, a refined young teacher from Sydney. Grant is indentured to his job in the outback for another year—he must pay off a thousand dollar bond before he can leave—and loathes everything about life in the plains. His stopover in the intense and insanely proud mining town of Bundanyabba is supposed to be for a night, after which he’ll fly home, to embrace the comforts of a big city, the soul-cleansing sea, and an impossibly alluring girlfriend.
Alas, “the Yabba” gets its claws into him. (“Yabba” stems from a Koori word for “to talk,” something the town’s locals do a lot of, but Aussies will also think of the small nipping crayfish called yabbies.) Winding down at a massive pub that by law should be closed, Grant is approached by a policeman (the veteran actor Chips Rafferty in a last and bravura performance). The cop serves as a sly and hospitable Charon, giving off just a whiff of threat. He tells Grant about the town (wonderful place, just a few suicides), and introduces him to two-up, an old game where pennies are thrown in the air and which can make a person a lot of money very quickly. Tempted by the thought of buying his way out of debt and the outback itself, Grant gets sucked in.
When he wakes the next day, Grant has enough cash left to afford some hair of the dog, but little more than that, and must devise some new way to get to Sydney. In a pub he meets an amusing bow-tied little man, Tim Hynes, who sympathizes, buys him drinks, and invites him round to lunch. In short order, Grant’s introduced to Hynes’s mysterious, hard-shelled daughter Janette (pointedly, the one real female player in this microcosmos), two strapping, vaguely menacing miners named Dick and Joe, and Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence), who is an alcoholic doctor and the town’s resident deviant-philosopher-madman. Following a mess of a night, the men go hunting for kangaroos—a largely useless and unsporting slaughter—and continue to knock back staggering quantities of alcohol. I won’t go into the rest, except to say that Grant unravels, pays heartily for his sin of pride, and comes out a different person.
The outdoor Bundanyabba scenes in the film were shot in the western New South Wales mining town of Broken Hill. Sulphide Street, advertised with nicely odorous symbolism when Grant steps off the train, is no invention, and Kotcheff drew from his own eventful experiences in the town. At the same time, to attain his vision, he had the inspiration of shipping in more red dust, and even actor-flies expressly generated for the purpose. While it all looks convincing enough, even Australians can be unsure of when exactly the mirror being used is warping. It’s standard for pub-going men down under, as in the rest of the world, to push one another to keep up, but was or is it normal in such isolated places to shout people beers while they’re obviously working on nearly full ones, as happens every other minute in “Wake in Fright”?
That exaggerative forces are at work, though, is clear in a number of ways. The semi-legal details of towns like Bundanyabba are a fact of history; nevertheless, the stunning gambling and bar settings in the film double as caverns of the underworld, scenes for a metaphysical wager. The main people Grant meets are types, just as he himself is a sacrificial city-lamb. Surprisingly, the distortions don’t detract from the film’s accuracy: they’re part of it. The movie’s precision consists of isolating and hugely magnifying just one side of life, the better to dissect it. I haven’t lived in the outback and wasn’t alive when the film was made, but there are all sorts of things about Australia in the movie I’ve never seen portrayed so well.
Perhaps most eagerly discussed by critics is the film’s take on mateship, the camaraderie that genuinely exists in the country, yet is often mythicized. In the film it appears as comically ambiguous, a life-giving spring of easy fellowship and hospitality, but also a crutch for men acting up, an excuse for whatever happens while legless. Throughout the story, it requires all of Grant’s strength to decline offers of booze from friendly acquaintances or downright strangers; I lost count the number of times he’s told to drink up, or given a dirty look (what’s known as a “greasy”) whenever he doesn’t immediately slug down his glass.
Further, and even though the film is a fever-dream, it’s uniquely shrewd about real patterns of aggression. There’s the obvious violence done to people and nature, yes, but this is connected to more everyday forms, the subtle, easily missable animosity that can lurk in talk and gesture. Kotcheff and his actors—especially Dick and Joe, the mining pair played respectively by Jack Thompson and Peter Whittle—are masters at pregnant silences, Schadenfreude grins, and the grown-men play-fighting that can suddenly ignite. When Dick slowly addresses Grant by his first name, it’s with a similar underlying sense of threat as when strangers call each other “mate” just as a fight is about to boil over.
While it’s tempting to say that it required a foreigner to see such traits so clearly, it should be noted that the film is extremely faithful to Cook’s short novel. Kotcheff’s few narrative departures are quietly decisive, and generally work to accentuate the story’s elements of nightmarish fable. He’s partly explained his uncanny feeling for the culture by observing that both Canada and Australia are nations where, instead of liberating, space imprisons. My guess is that just one of his additions could only have come from an outsider: the cruelly funny moment when, in the RSL club, the lights dim, and everyone hushes and stands as a speaker on the wall honors the fallen. The “Lest we forget” is said, and all instantly resume yakking, drinking, and playing the poker machines.
Given everything above, it’s not much of a surprise that “Wake in Fright” wasn’t immediately welcomed at home (it enjoys cult status now). Audiences generally don’t like being hit with the dark side of their national culture, especially not when it’s by outsiders. Yet, all told, the film’s uncomfortable spotlight is pretty fairly manned. A few of the locals in the Yabba may resemble devils, but there’s an innocence to them, too, and Grant, the stand-in for modern civilization, makes for a poor angel. An arrogant visitor and bumbling guest, Grant’s lack of center is shown in the fact that, whether he refuses or accepts hospitality, he can rarely meet the offer graciously and remain his own person: in keeping with his rash gamble, it’s all or nothing. The script makes clear that he’s more than a passive onlooker, and that he participates in the ghastly things that happen to him. In fact, his very involvement with the town is what ends up redeeming him to us; it’s the start of an education. When they first meet, the doc checks him: “It’s death to farm out here. It’s worse than death in the mines. You want them to sing opera as well?”
It would be a shame if the movie, forty years on, be thought safely historic or inapplicable to today—its ambiguous and grotesque dance still rattles. Don’t act like you’re better than those in hell, it tells us. At some point you may have to pass through.
