Wake in Fright [HD]

A restored masterpiece
I came across a description of this film a while ago which made it sound like an overwrought B Picture, a format to accurately represent the world it depicts - melodramatic, crude and brash. It is much more than that. From the opening 360' panning shot around the tiny wooden platform of an Australian outback station, taking in two shabby and rusting buildings dwarfed by an endless vista of red sand, to the brilliant portraits of a range of characters who inhabit this barren and malevolent landscape, it constantly surprises and delights with visual power and human complexity. It is no surprise to discover that the underlying material on which the film is based, a novel by Kenneth Cook, was to have been a project for Dirk Bogarde and Joseph Losey at one point in its development. The film ended in the extremely capable hands of Ted Kotcheff and screenwriter Evan Jones and is beautifully constructed and paced. There is throughout a sense of threat and a sustained tension, but the tensions...

Awesome
This film (set in the Australian Outback) is at once an hallucinatory nightmare and intensely realistic - so bizarre and yet utterly believable. The acting is very fine - everyone disappears into their roles, and the cinematography and montage are excellent. Donald Pleasance is especially good as the crazy old doctor. The climax is unbelievably intense. If you are a member of PETA you will not be able to watch the final Kangaroo hunt sequence.

Highest recommendation!

Long overdue Masterpiece
Probably Ted Kotchef's finest film, "Wake In Fright" (aka "Outback"), shocked shamed, and enraged a substantial chunk of the Australian population. It died at the box-office, got one TV screening in the early eighties (where I saw it), and then was forgotten -- or at least given up for dead.

Almost forty years later the negative was rediscovered only days away from final destruction (in the US of all places) and a badly needed restoration was begun.

The story: an endentured school teacher in a tiny outback town heads for Sydney and six weeks holiday. But only a day into the journey he loses his money gambling, and is left at the mercy of the local townsfolk.

Like Roeg's Walkabout, Kotchef sees the Australian landscape with the fresh eye of a foreigner. He portrays a society that no domestic film maker would've dared at that time. And he makes a brilliant film doing it. But where Roeg found a desert teeming with life and energetic beauty, Kotchef...

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