One of the highlights of this year’s Fantastic Fest was the screening of Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 “lost” masterpiece Wake In Fright, a brutal take on the kind of collective madness that can arise in isolated rural towns where the civilizing forces of society have been beaten into submission by the primordial forces of nature. As men vainly struggle against the fate of being swallowed up by endless landscapes and battered by a cruel sun, violence and rage become the broad strokes by which they enlarge themselves. Wake In Fright enters their world and doesn’t blink as blood and alcohol become the bond between a bunch of “locals” and a young stranger who unwittingly wanders onto their turf.

Wake In Fright came out the same year as Straw Dogs, McCabe And Mrs. Miller, A Clockwork Orange and Dennis Hopper’s ill-fated The Last Movie. It shares with those films a sense of man’s disconnection from the world around him and the resulting spiritual emptiness that follows. Whether it be the alienation of living outside of society or the cultural rupture between old and new worlds, the dis-ease of being rootless or uprooted can drive men to violence in a perverse declaration of identity. I kill, therefore I am.

Wake In Fright is a desert noir that is as emotionally dark as a Jim Thompson novel and as unrelentingly sunseared as a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. Director Kotcheff has spoken of his love for the films of Antonioni and the sumptuous palette of Red Desert came to mind as I watched Wake In Fright. It’s a stunning looking film.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Wake In Fright is Donald Pleasence in a performance that should have garnered him heaps of critical praise and awards. It’s a brave, visceral thing of beauty that does for acting what Hunter Thompson does for literature. Pleasence is 3D in a 2D world. Finally, the world at large will have an opportunity to savor Pleasence at his most sublimely unhinged.

The release of Wake In Fright and its beautiful restoration puts back into circulation a film that, had the gods of distribution not been crazy, most likely would have found a receptive audience back in 1971. It holds its own when put up against the post- Easy Rider, maverick, film making that was being made at the time. Its uncompromising in content and has the kind of integrity and truth seeking that used to be a badge of honor in the film making community. Unlike the flow of meaningless crap flowing out of Hollywood these days, Kotcheff’s celluloid cri du coeur is one of those rare films that aspires to make a difference, to alter the way we see ourselves and the world we temporarily inhabit. Maybe the cultural pendulum is swinging back in the direction of this kind of soulful film making. Maybe Wake In Fright has found its time. Not that much has changed since 1971. Wars are still being fought and men are still defining themselves by the length of their gun barrels and the Earth still shudders in revulsion at every bloody step they take.

I’m not real big on re-writing press releases to make them my own. It’s cheating. So I’ll just share the distributor’s, followed by a clip from the movie and an exclusive Dangerous Minds’ interview with Wake In Fright director Ted Kotcheff.

Wake In Fright originally made its debut at Cannes in 1971, where it earned a Palme D’Or nomination. The film made its return to the festival in 2009 courtesy of guest-curator Martin Scorsese, following the completion of a comprehensive restoration. It was there where Wake In Fright held the honor of being one of two films to have been shown twice in the history of the festival. The film is lauded for its stark and uncompromising vision by champions such as Roger Ebert who said Wake In Fright is “powerful, genuinely shocking and rather amazing,” and celebrated musician/songwriter/screenwriter Nick Cave, who said the film is “the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence.”

Believed to be lost for many years, Wake In Fright was restored after an exhaustive decade-long search for original film elements. Fortuitously, the negative was unearthed in Pittsburgh, PA, in canisters marked for destruction just one week away from its impending incineration. The materials were then restored frame-by-frame at Sydney’s At Lab Deluxe with the aid of the National Film and Sound Archives of Australia.

Wake In Fright opens on October 5th in many major cities in the USA. Check here for details.
 

 
I visited with Ted Kotcheff at Fantastic Fest with the intent of doing a brief interview. As it turns out, the interview became a relaxed conversation. Ted is a wonderful man who doesn’t waste a word and has some great stories to tell. When it came time to edit the footage, I decided not to cut a thing.