They didn't want to hit me, they wanted me to hit them.

Wake In Fright
Ted Kotcheff 1971 Australia
Starring: Gary Bond, Donald Pleasance, Chips Rafferty, Sylvia Kay, John Meillon, Al Thomas, Dawn Lake

Made in 1971 but thought lost until 2009 Ted Kotcheff's outback terror show Wake In Fright is rich in ironies. For one, despite the film having been lauded (both then and now) as a deeply unsettling but essentially truthful portrait of post-colonial Australia the director is Canadian, the screenwriter Evan Jones is a Jamaican-born Brit who didn't even visit the country until a decade or so after shooting halted and the two main actors are English. There's also the fact that Kotcheff went on to direct Weekend At Bernie's, a comedy (albeit a dark one) a million miles away from WIF's raw and brutal intensity. The simultaneously desolate, spacious and claustrophobic expanse of the setting only adds to things with John Grant (an incredible Gary Bond who starts out resembling a young Peter O'Toole, handsome, disciplined and happy in his shirtsleeves in spite of the heat, but ends up dragging his body along the boardwalk, his clothes stained with kangaroo blood, an unwanted second-hand rifle in his hands, heading for the nearest pub), the middle-class schoolteacher posted to the back of beyond to work off his contract, being given an education and nowhere to run while stranded overnight in Bundanyabba (based on the pleasingly named Broken Hill), a local mining town where the main pastime is rampant alcoholism and men outnumber women three-to-one. What's more the guide for his descent into hell is the local policeman (talented Australian stalwart Chips Rafferty in one of his last roles) and the menacing, ferociously masculine locals who end up forcing him to join them on a horrifying kangaroo hunt (even more worrying considering Kotcheff is a vegetarian) where one of them attacks one of the dazzled victims with his fists before slitting the poor animal's throat are also regularly uncommonly kind and hospitable to him, practically adopting him when he's unexpectedly left with nothing. Not that his fall is actually such a massive jump, even as the film starts he's drinking and smoking heavily and when a chance to gamble the money he's already won and possibly make more appears his lip curls and his face becomes monstrous, his tongue constantly threatening to overtake his teeth. Grant represents a different variety of masculinity to the locals led by Pleasance's diminutive and pathetic yet savage and looming Doc although the thought that he could once have been another educated outsider forced unwillingly into the town and therefore signifies John's future is an unwavering spectre. This clash and the aggression (and violent eroticism) endemic of isolated, bored men is the film's main theme and women are generally only seen as a symbol of the civilisation Grant wants to escape to. The single notable female presence in the town is the daughter of one of the locals (played with a haunting silence by Kotcheff's then-wife Sylvia Kay) and she's at least as damaged and potentially vicious as the men. I can think of at least one Weekend At Bernie's fan who will disagree with me but I wouldn't hesitate to call WIF Kotcheff's best work by far. A powerful, superbly acted, deeply disturbing, sweat and bitter-drenched slice of authentically destructive humanity.