WAKE IN FRIGHT

(A.k.a. OUTBACK)

John (Gary Bond) is an English teacher who has taken the job of teaching in a one-classroom school in the remote Australian desert town of Tiboonda. As the class sits quietly waiting for term to end and their six-week Christmas break to begin, we get an early glimpse of how John is a stickler for playing life by the rules: the class are not dismissed until, literally, the minute-hand on the classroom clock tells him the time is right.

We gradually learn that John has paid a $1,000.00 to the State Education Department which guarantees him a permanent job in teaching. Unfortunately, one stipulation is that - unless he can raise further collateral and buy out his bond - he must complete a full year's contract in the dead-end town of Tiboonda.

With that heavy prospect on his mind, John leaves the school for the Christmas break and enjoys a drink at the town's only pub before grabbing his suitcase and making for the rickety old train stop nearby. The plan is for John to spend his six weeks' vacation sunning it up in Sydney, in a bid to forget his miserable existence in Tiboonda. It's a far cry from the flashbacks he has of cavorting with a comely girlfriend on a beach in the past - he's only half-joking when he tells a barman he'll return to Tiboonda, but "not if I can rob a bank".

However, the plan for an easy-going vacation goes awry when John is forced to make a one-night stopover in the seedy town of Bundanyabba.

As things start to go wrong for John, he's befriended by local authority figure Jock (Chips Rafferty) in the town's pub and is eventually invited to an after-hours steakhouse which also incorporates a back room where sweaty men drunkenly partake in an illicit gambling den.

The drink starts to get the better of John, his confidence grows and he begins to think he has a chance of winning at the locals' game of coin-spinning. If he wins, he can buy out his bond and leave the backwaters of Tiboonda for good.

Alas, John ends up losing everything. And things only get worse for him, when local doctor Tydon (Donald Pleasance) insists on softening the blow by taking John back to his place to drown his sorrows with a few mates...

Based on Kenneth Cook's 1961 novel of the same name (the title stems from his line "may you dream of the devil and wake in fright"), WAKE IN FRIGHT is widely regarded as one of the greatest of Australian films. Nick Cave has called it "the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence". Oddly enough, however, it was directed by Canadian filmmaker Ted Kotcheff. Kotcheff's resume is certainly eclectic if nothing else: among other things, his prolific career includes directorial credits for the original FUN WITH DICK AND JANE, FIRST BLOOD, WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S and a handful of episodes of the "Red Shoe Diaries" television series.

But here, there's no denying his masterful control over the sweaty, brooding material. No matter that he's not a native, nor that Anglo-Jamaican Evan Jones, who adapted the story for the screen, had never set foot on Australian soil. While such facts may have pissed off the locals somewhat upon the film's 1971 release, the persistence of time has enabled audiences to appreciate how their depiction of the outback has endured as a scarily accurate, uncompromisingly honest one. Here, characters perspire both from the heat and the constant threat of their closed-community pettiness brimming over into barely acknowledged violence.

The cinematography, by Brian West, is sumptuous. It captures the gloriously expansive Australian outdoors in all its sun-kissed glory, capably making the desert seem at once wide open and claustrophobically lonely.

John Scott's singularly ominous score is also an integral part of the film's mood - its understated balance of the playful and the sinister echoing the laidback threat presented by the outback.

As Kotcheff has gone on record as saying, though, this isn't necessarily a comment upon Australian culture: it's about, in his words, "men behaving badly"...

The cast are all excellent, of course. In what is an odd role for him, Pleasance excels as the doctor of dubious credentials, a drunken king among drinkers - a friendly face that can turn murderous within the blink of an eye. Bond is the perfect patsy to such animated menace, at equal turns perplexed and arrogant in the midst of a world he doesn't even want to understand. His character shouldn't be likeable, but it's testament to his skill as an actor that we do sympathise with his cause.

At turns funny, unsettling, bizarre and sometimes downright distressing (there's a drink-addled foray into midnight kangaroo hunting which utilises documentary footage of the creatures being gunned down for real by genuine hunters), WAKE IN FRIGHT is an unusual but easily accessible film that builds almost insidiously into a systematic destruction of the mild-manned John's character. To elaborate on how that's achieved would be criminal; WAKE IN FRIGHT is a beautiful drama that needs to be seen to be fully appreciated.

Following its poor theatrical distribution and lukewarm reception in the early 70s, WAKE IN FRIGHT then disappeared for three decades and was thought of as a "lost" film - until a diligent West finally tracked down the original negative mere days before it was scheduled to be destroyed. In 2009, the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia oversaw a HD restoration of these materials and the film was given a new lease of life: a second screening at Cannes (one of only two films to be screened twice at the festival - the other being Michelangelo Antonioni's L'AVVENTURA) and blu-ray releases in Australia (courtesy of Madman) and America (through Drafthouse Films).

Now, the film finally gets its day in the sun on British shores, courtesy of our friends at Eureka.

Eureka are screening a print of the 2009 restoration at selected cinemas throughout March 2014. Following this, the film is due to be released on dual format blu-ray and DVD by them on 31st March.

Having just watched a timecoded DVD screener disc provided for review by Eureka, it's safe to say their presentation hasn't tampered with the restoration's sterling efforts: a back-to-back comparison with my Madman blu-ray suggests both offerings boast identical results in respect of colours (warm), contrast (solid), detail (strong) and organic accuracy (very filmic quality). Albeit, taking into account the difference between standard definition and HD. Sure, some scenes have a worn or faded effect - but the film looks miraculously good for the most part.

The film is presented in 1.85:1 and enhanced for 16x9 televisions here.

English 2.0 audio is also very clean and clear, having been treated to an equally successful restoration job.

As for the extras that will be provided on Eureka's disc, I wasn't privy to those but can say that the excellent commentary track provided by Kotcheff and editor Anthony Buckley on the Madman release will be present, along with a selection of interviews and behind the scenes footage.

My guess is the excellent 23-minute Kotcheff interview that featured on the Madman disc will also be included, in which he explains "I'm very attracted to characters who don't know themselves" and goes on to describe shooting the kangaroo sequence as "nightmarish".

Either way, you can also expect the original US TV spot and a collectors' booklet. The striking DVD cover art, by the way, is a reproduction of the theatrical poster art that's been created for Eureka's cinematic screenings. Nice.

If you're lucky enough to have this screen in a cinema near you, please make the effort to go and see that. I say that for your own sake - it's a magnificent piece of hard-to-categorise cinema (despite that title, it's NOT horror - at least, not in the conventional sense) that I'm sure will look great on the big screen. Everyone else can look forward to Eureka's dual format domestic release, safe in the knowledge that the presentation is lovely.

By Stuart Willis