ScreenWize

When film editor Anthony Buckley saw the first batch of footage for Wake In Fright, he knew he was looking at something very special. It was of a professional kangaroo cull that had been shot by cinematographer John Maclean. “It was beautifully photographed,” says Buckley, recalling the moment back in 1970, “and it was all shot well before any of the actors involved in the film had started work so that we could work out how to stage what the actors had to do to match the action. I edited the two parts together – the professional kangaroo shoot and the actors pretending to shoot them - to create the final sequence.”

That kangaroo hunt – with a young Jack Thompson, a menacing Donald Pleasance and a bewildered Gary Bond – became part of one of the most notorious film sequences of its era, a brutal and beautiful depiction of a night out with the boys in country Australia. And even though the film was made nearly forty years ago, it still has a chilling sense of something fundamentally Australian about it – the colours of the outback, the aggressive friendliness of the local people, and the booze and gambling and eroticism that can trap a young man far from home.

The original version of Wake In Fright – based on a novel by Kenneth Cook and directed by Canadian Ted Kotcheff - had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, followed by a successful ten-month season in Paris and a disappointing time at the domestic box-office. It then slipped into oblivion, occasionally appearing on late-night television with comments from Bill Collins. But as the 25th anniversary of its release loomed on the calendar, one of the originally backers - show-biz personality Bobby Limb - approached Buckley and asked him where the film was. “I had no idea,” said Buckley, “but as the rights were about to revert to Bobby’s company which co-produced the film – I promised him I would find it.” This was back in 1996, and it took Buckley eight years to track down the film and get it back to Australia. Limb didn’t live long enough to hear the happy ending to what must surely be one the great stories of film rescue and recovery. “A film-maker’s fantasy,” says Director Ted Kotcheff. “The loss of the negative would have been a knife in my heart.”

But it is also a testament to Buckley’s persistence. Not only did he track down the film, but he worked tirelessly to have it restored with the help of the National Film and Sound Archive. Thirty-eight years after its premiere, the film – once again in pristine condition - screened to a packed audience at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in their “Classics” retrospective programme - and screened at the 2009 Sydney Film Festival. It nearly wasn’t so.

Although a bad VHS version of the film was circulating in America in the mid-1990’s Buckley wanted to locate the original negative of the film, or at least a decent print that could be used for restoration purposes. He started his search for the missing negative in London. “Colour lab work was very new in Australia at the time we made Wake In Fright,” says Buckley, “and the film was sent to the UK for finishing. All the original film material stayed there, and all the prints were made there.” Fortunately for Buckley there were only five labs he had to contact. “I got in touch with them all, but with no luck, although one of them said they had nineteen other Australian films with no owners.” However, the word got out that the hunt was on for Wake in Fright and later that year Buckley received a call from a man in Dublin. “He told me he had a print of the film that was in an satisfactory condition. He shipped it to Sydney and although we screened it at the Chauvel, it had some awful joins and couldn’t be restored.”

In the meantime Buckley had continued to search for the missing negative – the most important original element of the film – which he tracked down in 1998 to a bonded warehouse in London. But when Buckley arrived to collect his find, he discovered to his horror that the company involved had gone into liquidation and all their film assets had been shipped to Pittsburg in the USA a week earlier. “My heart sank,” said Buckley. “I wasn’t sure what to do next.”

It took four more years of corporate forensic work, tracing the film’s movements through a long list of mergers, takeovers and acquisitions to CBS, who had inherited – amongst many other films –the Wake In Fright material. “They weren’t sure what to do with all these films, ”said Buckley, “and they left them in a vault. I kept pestering them for two years until one day someone got so fed up with me they went to Pittsburg to see if they could find anything. You wouldn’t believe it, but there they were – 263 cans of film for Wake in Fright – in a dump truck marked for destruction. They were probably within hours – if not minutes - of the being destroyed.”

Some hurried negotiations saw the cans air freighted to Australia the same week. “It was a very close shave,” says Buckley, who was overwhelmed and relieved with what was found when the cans were opened at the NFSA. “Everything was there – the original negative, the sound track, all the mixing tracks, and all the tri-separations. It was everything we needed to do a full restoration.”

Leaving aside the story behind the film’s re-awakening, there are some very good reasons why the film is worthy of the attention its being given. It was the last film for Australian legend Chips Rafferty – who plays the ominous local town cop - as well as the first for Jack Thompson. It also includes one of the best performances of Donald Pleasance’s long and distinguished career. And then there’s that kangaroo hunt. Anthony Buckley is worried about it all over again. “ It was pretty gruesome when I first saw it,” says Buckley, “even though I was using a black-and-white working print for editing purposes. I am worried about the reaction from today’s audience – there have been two generations since 1971 – and there may be some voices of outrage. It’ll be very interesting to see the reaction.” Whatever it is, it’ll only be there thanks to Buckley’s determination to make sure this gem of Australian film history didn’t remain forever committed to a fuzzy VHS oblivion.

Filed Under: Interviews by Simon