In the 1970s and early ’80s, a wave of low-budget Australian cinema gained popularity with US audiences. These Ozploitation movies aimed to exploit the emerging market for salacious down-under content: sex, violence, fast cars, and cheap thrills and spills.
Wake in Fright (1971) — the first adaptation of a 1961 novel by Kenneth Cook — is the standout of the genre. The film follows John Grant, a teacher who gets on a train to Sydney at the end of the school term but somehow winds up in a desert town called Bundanyabba. He reluctantly bonds with the locals and becomes swept up in their drinking, gambling, and kangaroo-shooting culture. Needless to say, things go badly awry.
The film was released internationally as Outback and achieved remarkable success — but it initially performed quite poorly in Australia. There are apocryphal stories about cinema audiences jeering it as un-Australian. Fifty-five years later, Wake in Fright is now well and truly part of the Australian mainstream. Journalist Jacqueline Kent, who was married to Kenneth Cook, argued that “the title is now a cliché for newspaper and magazine subeditors: shorthand for the horror and danger that lurk outside Australia’s cities.”
Wake in Fright depicts maddening chaos fueled by booze, and a simmering sexual tension that erupts into violence. It’s messy and sticky: endless sweat on lobster-red skin with a coating of dust. Uncomfortable close-ups mirror the outback’s oppressive, claustrophobic heat. The rough, jokey dialogue has a blunt force to it, erasing and pushing back reality. At the core of the film is unhinged mateship: it’s all about repression and release.
Wake in Fright was filmed in the remote mining town of Broken Hill. Director Ted Kotcheff described how the locals were so desperate for human contact that every day men came up very close and challenged him to punch them in the face. The film is clearly his attempt to capture some of this deranged male loneliness.
Broken…
Auteur: Flick Ford
