{Blu-ray Review} What Happened to Socrates: Wake in Fright (1971) Restored

“All the little devils are proud of Hell.”

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From what little I knew about Wake in Fright, I expected another in a long line of 1970s movies about emasculated city folk thrust into a rural hell – see also Deliverance (1972), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), etc.

Ask some people, and they’ll tell you that’s what it is, while others have described it (not inaccurately) as an anti-drinking PSA. Released as Outback outside Australia, the depiction of that landscape is, indeed, often hellish here, but I didn’t find that to be what Wake in Fright is really about at all.

The villains of Wake in Fright are not the locals – who, though rowdy and toxically masculine are, if anything, overly hospitable, unless you don’t want a beer. The villain isn’t even Donald Pleasance’s Mephistophelean Doc Tydon. The real villain is also the protagonist, John Grant (Gary Bond), a man at war with himself.

When we first meet John Grant, a bonded school teacher in the middle of nowhere who is heading back to Sydney for the Christmas vacation, he seems exactly the sort we expect to find in the kinds of movies I was discussing earlier. An attractive man in a crisp suit, John quotes poetry, and sees himself as both removed from and above his dingy, sweat-soaked surroundings – and the damned souls who are trapped within them.

Most such stories of city folks who run afoul of their rustic cousins are predicated on some sort of transgression. The fate of the urbanite is determined in part by their own hubris, their belief that they are better than the rural inhabitants they encounter. Ultimately, however, while the problem may begin with their actions, the main threat comes from without, from the rural people themselves who do, in fact, prove to be vicious and dangerous.

In Wake in Fright, by contrast, every evil that befalls John from the time he arrives in the mining town of Bundanyabba – “the Yabba” to the locals – is of his own devising, even if he is also three sheets to the wind the entire time. Every debauchery into which he is initiated is one in which he participates enthusiastically, even if he regards it and himself with disgust either later on or midway through.

The problem isn’t that John believes he’s better than the people of “the Yabba,” though he does, nor is it that he is secretly every bit as violent and degraded as the people he encounters. John’s problem is that both are true, and he is engaged in a constant tug-of-war with himself. His own self-image tells him that he is a cultured individual who could not find companionship or comfort among the sweaty, vulgar people of “the Yabba,” yet he takes to each new debauchery with an unchecked eagerness, even volunteering himself for several of the acts which cause him the most internal friction.

It isn’t that either of these sides of John are “wrong,” though they might be, nor even that they cannot coexist. The problem is that each one denies the existence of the other, and so John can never find peace, torn constantly between these warring aspects of himself.

In this, Doc Tydon is less his nemesis than simply his reflection – the two halves of John Grant, brought into harmony with one another. Discussing a sexually promiscuous character with whom John has had an encounter, Tydon says, “Janette and I are alike. We break the rules. But we know more about ourselves than most people.”

Tydon knows what he wants – both aspects of what he wants, to listen to opera and discuss Socrates, and to smash up bars and wrestle in the dark. For good or ill, whether they are obscene or saintly, he has brought his desires into harmony with one another, even while that same internal conflict is tearing John apart and driving him to ruin.

Wake in Fright faced its own conflicts. Though largely well received by critics – it premiered at Cannes, where it was in competition for the Palme d’Or (it lost to the Harold Pinter-scripted British historical drama The Go-Between) – Wake in Fright underperformed at the box office, a fact that has been partly attributed to the film being “perhaps too uncomfortably direct and uncompromising.”

One anecdote claims that, at an early screening in Australia, one viewer shouted at the screen, “That’s not us!” To which Jack Thompson, who plays one of the roughnecks in the film, replied, “Sit down, mate. It is us.”

The film faced controversy for more than just its depiction of life in the Australian Outback. A lengthy and almost unbearablesequence near the end of the film showcases an actual kangaroo hunt, including footage of real kangaroos being shot and killed. A producer’s note at the end of the film states:

The hunting scenes depicted in this film were taken during an actual kangaroo hunt by professional licensed hunters.

For this reason and because the survival of the Australian kangaroo is seriously threatened, these scenes were shown uncut after consultation with leading animal welfare organisations in Australia and the United Kingdom.

According to behind-the-scenes accounts, the crew didn’t much care for the kangaroo hunting sequence, either, with one producer fainting after seeing a kangaroo “splattered in a particularly spectacular fashion,” and so the crew staged a power outage to put an end to filming.

Thanks in part to some of these factors, Wake in Fright spent many years as a virtually “lost film,” its only known copy in such poor condition that it could not be remastered for home video release or distribution. In 2002, the film’s editor found original negatives in a Pittsburgh archive, in a shipping container marked “For Destruction,” which eventually led to its restoration and re-release.

In 2009, Wake in Fright once again played at Cannes. And today, you can watch it the same way I finally did: on Blu-ray or 4K UHD from Arrow Video.