[WAKE IN FRIGHT
screens Thursday December 6th at 8:45 pm and Sunday December 9th at
6:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]
Review
by Bob Ignizio
It's Christmas break, and Australian
schoolteacher John Grant (Gary Bond) has plans to visit his
girlfriend in Sydney in the once thought lost Austrailian thriller
WAKE IN FRIGHT. John is essentially an indentured servant,
having signed a $1000 bond in order to get his teaching degree. His
end of the bargain is that he has to go where he's sent and stay
there until he pays his debt, in this case the tiny outback town of
Tiboonda, a posting the young pedagogue clearly feels is beneath him.
Before John can get to Sydney, his
train has to make a stopover in the mining town of Bundanyabba, which
the locals all refer to as “The Yabba”. Here John is confronted
with the horrors of working class Australian manhood, people he views
as a bunch of sweaty, dirty, beer drinking slobs. Even the
friendliness of these people gets on John's nerves, but after he
loses all his money gambling John finds he has no choice but to
depend on the kindness of strangers.
Eventually John winds up staying with
the town's alcoholic Doctor, “Doc” Tydon (Donald Pleasance).
Tydon lives completely off the grid and without money, offering his
medical services free of charge to customers who don't mind that he's
usually drunk in return for food and beer. John spends an
alcohol fueled lost weekend with the doctor, during which he must
come to terms with his own animalistic side and the realization that
he isn't any better than these people he looks down on. It's a
truth he may not be able to accept.
Made in 1971, the
pacing may seem a bit slow for modern tastes, but that just allows viewers to soak up all
the sordid details of life in the outback. Perhaps the most notorious
of these details is a scene in which Grant goes kangaroo hunting with
the Doc and two of his friends. Some of the footage we see is from a
real kangaroo hunt, which may be disturbing to some viewers.
In
some ways, WAKE IN FRIGHT
is kind of like an Australian version of DELIVERANCE.
Certainly the residents of “The Yabba” are outback stereotypes,
and the film plays on the fears sophisticated city folk have of those
they perceive as being beneath them. What keeps the film from being
the down-under equivalent of American “hicksploitation” films is
the way it breaks its protagonist down until there's no difference
between him and the feared “other”. The real fear is in
recognizing that we really are all the same, and that we'rekind of savage and brutal beneath the veneer of civilization. 4 out of 4 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment