http://www.facebook.com/moviemaniacsDE - Darsteller / cast: Donald Pleasence , Gary Bond , Chips Rafferty
Genre: drama
Regie / directed by: Ted Kotcheff
Theatrical Release: New York, October 5, 2012 at Film Forum; Los Angeles, October 19, 2012 Landmark NuArt Theatre; Nationally Oct/Nov 2012
offizielle Filmsite: http://
Verwendung mit freundlicher Genehmigung von Draft House Films
used with authorization
from the press notes:
Alongside Mad Max and Walkabout, Wake In Fright is widely acknowledged as one of the seminal films in the development of modern Australian cinema. Combining the backwoods horror of Deliverance and the gritty nihilism of Straw Dogs, the film tells the story of a British schoolteacher's (Gary Bond) descent into personal demoralization at the hands of drunken, deranged derelicts (including a very inebriated "doctor" played by Donald Pleasence), while stranded in a small town in outback Australia.
The film made its world premiere at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival where it was nominated for a Palme D'Or and its US distribution rights were sold. Retitled Outback and hurried into a few theaters across the country, the film barely played for more than a week before it was yanked from circulation due to poor attendance and lack of advertising. Wake In Fright vanished into obscurity, barely reviewed by American critics and not ever appearing on domestic VHS or DVD.
For over three decades the film materials were thought to be lost until the film's persistent cinematographer unearthed the original negative elements in Philadelphia in canisters marked for destruction just one week away from its impending incineration. The materials were painstakingly restored frame-by-frame at Sydney's At Lab Deluxe with the support of the National Film And Sound Archive of Australia. The new restoration was invited back to Cannes by guest curator Martin Scorsese, where it held the honor of being one of two films to ever screen twice at the festival (the other being Antonioni's L'Avventura).
Virtually unseen in the US and renowned in its home country after years of neglect for its daring criticism, Wake In Fright is ripe for rediscovery, and returns after 40 years to reclaim its title as one of the most awe-inspiring, brutal and stunning films of all time.
Wake in Fright is the story of John Grant (Gary Bond), a bonded teacher who arrives in the rough Australian outback mining town of Bundanyabba, planning to stay overnight before catching the plane to Sydney. But, as his one night stretches to five, he plunges headlong toward his own destruction. When the alcohol-induced mist lifts, the educated John Grant is no more. Instead there is a self-loathing man in a desolate wasteland, dirty, red-eyed, sitting against a tree and looking at a rifle with one bullet left.
I want to make sure as many people as possible read this interview James Cathcart did in the Scene this week with Ted Kotcheff, the veteran director whose furious 1971 psychological drama Wake in Fright is one of the year's most acclaimed reissues. The movie opens Friday at The Belcourt, and I watched enough to know I want to see it in a theater. It's a gut-wrenching study of macho derangement set in an Outback hellhole, where a civilized teacher (Gary Bond) succumbs to the lure of constant drinking, gambling and fuck-or-fight belligerence. Think Greed with the steadily ratcheting unease of Straw Dogs — that's what I've seen of Wake in Fright.
So James, known as one of Nashville's hardcore termite cinephiles, looked up Kotcheff, whose credits extend from 1965's Life at the Top through First Blood and Weekend at Bernie's all the way to episodes of Law & Order: SVU. The interview that resulted offers one great story after another, but one anecdote in particular blew my mind. A story from Kotcheff's early days in live television, it should be taught as an example of quick thinking under unimaginable duress:
In 1958 you were directing a live television broadcast of an Armchair Theatre installment called Underground when tragedy struck. Sadly, no recording of that broadcast exists today, but could you share what happened? That was certainly a test of my nerves. There was a wonderful actor, Gareth Jones. He was 32 and one week away from getting married. We had a three-act structure with two commercial breaks in it. Towards the end of act two, the makeup girl rushed into the control room to say that Gareth Jones had passed out. "Oh my God," I said, but we had to continue — it was live.The play was about an H-bomb that struck London and flattened it and killed everybody except those people who were down in the underground, which is why it's called Underground. I had a long shot where the actors are entering near a tunnel, and the lead actor arrives and sees that Jones was not there, whom he was supposed to have a scene with. So he says to the five or six other characters that were with him — and quite loudly, to cue me as well — he says, "I THINK WE SHOULD GO DOWN THIS TUNNEL!" And thankfully I had a camera ready.
The plot was that a fascistic society was being created in this social vacuum. And Gareth Jones was playing this kind of Judas character who betrays them all. He was the villain, in a sense. Anyways, as Act Two comes to a close, the makeup girl rushed back in and she said, "Gareth Jones had a heart attack — he's dead!"
Sorry. You've got to go here to read
how the story turns out— and it's just as incredible. Spread the word, both about this piece and about Wake in Fright.
