Episode 208 - Wake In Fright (1971)

Welcome to Bundanyabba. The beer is cold, the welcome is warm, and leaving may prove surprisingly difficult.

This time on Stinking Pause, Scott, Paul and Charlie are joined by Maurice in Melbourne and Kerry in America for a trip into the heat, dust and rapidly collapsing good intentions of Ted Kotcheff’s extraordinary 1971 drama Wake in Fright.

Gary Bond stars as John Grant, a young schoolteacher who becomes stranded in the remote Australian mining town of Bundanyabba after missing his train. All he needs to do is survive one night and continue his journey the following morning. Unfortunately, this simple plan fails to account for gambling, endless glasses of beer and the local determination to ensure that no visitor remains sober enough to remember where the railway station is.

What follows is a brutal and increasingly nightmarish descent into violence, humiliation and male camaraderie at its most aggressively hospitable. Bleak, unsettling and occasionally very funny in ways that leave you feeling slightly guilty, Wake in Fright remains one of Australian cinema’s most powerful and unforgettable films.

Between the two halves of our review, we celebrate the life and career of Donald Pleasence, the wonderfully distinctive British actor whose performance as the cheerfully dishevelled Doc Tydon gives the film much of its uneasy fascination. Pleasence could suggest menace, vulnerability and imminent psychological collapse with little more than a glance and a carefully raised eyebrow.

Then, having spent quite enough time contemplating isolation, alcohol and the fragile veneer of civilisation, we move on to our latest Celluloid Stinker.

The Thing with Two Heads stars Ray Milland and Roosevelt Grier as two men forced to share one body following a medical experiment that should probably have been stopped during the planning meeting.

One great film, one remarkable actor, two heads and enough questionable decision-making to fill several hospital negligence forms.

It can only be Stinking Pause.

 

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