It has been more than a week since I watched Wake in Fright and the film remains in my thoughts. I have sought out and listened podcasts discussing the film, its troubled launch, its status as a ‘lost movie,’ and its eventual rediscovery, restoration, and honors from the likes such as Martin Scorsese.
No aspect of the film is more controversial that the third act Kangaroo hunt depicted in savage, revolting realism because it was an actual, government sanctioned, kangaroo hunt.
The film’s director, Ted Kotcheff, is a vegetarian and reportedly, even at the time, quite concerned with animal rights. It is quite clear that nothing in the hunt is filmed in such a way as to glorify its violence or brutality. The sequence, critical to the character’s arc, is about John Grant’s final descent into a mindless, drunken state that surrenders all pretense of civility, rationality, and Ash in Alien might pronounce, ‘all delusions of morality.’
The controversy is could have Kotcheff, already a veteran director with three feature film and more than a dozen television episode under his belt, achieved the same dramatic and moral effect with a simulated hunt?
The cinematic technology of 1971 hasn’t yet dreamed of the fantastic capabilities computer generated imagery and Jaws with its robotic shark lay 4 years in future and with a budget 8 times that available to Kotcheff. Given the technological and budgetary a graphic, ‘in your face’ depiction of the Kangaroo hunt could only have been achieved with a real slaughter.
Was the goal worth the killing?
That’s a question without a clear objective answer. The hunt was not conducted for the film’s benefit. It was an already scheduled event that would have transpired with or without the production’s participation. Not filming it would have prevented no cruelty, It could be argued that the production taking part in the hunt actually saved some Kangaroos.
There are reports that the hunters drank heavily and in a drunken state began carelessly and cruelly wounding the animals and that this so offended and sicked the production team that they engineered a ‘power failure’ stopping the hunt. It is also possible that the presence of the production helped to encourage the drinking and rowdiness contributing to the violent orgy. We can’t know what would have happened without the production present.
How about the audience? It that level of graphic content necessary to provoke a response?
For people already concerned or disposed to care about animal cruelty, that level of graphic repulsive violence is not required. But perhaps for the large percentage of the population who gives it little or no thought, what have not experienced or envisioned what slaughter and cruelty actually look like, it might need that stomach turning sequence to shake them out of their complacency. Had Wake in Fright been a massive international box office hit it may have sparked an awareness in the public in the manner that Jaws launched a hatred and killing of sharks that the novel’s author regretted for the rest of his life. However, with the film not finding acclaim or success until the next century any impact from its intention is minimal to non-existent.
We can say at least Kotcheff tried to make a statement, an impression, to awaken public apathy to animal cruelty but another film has none of those reasons or excuses for its on-screen brutality to animals.
Michael Crichton’s 1979 film The Great Train Robbery, adapted from his own bestselling novel is a fictionalized account of a daring gold heist in Victorian England. One sequence of the film involves find the moral weakness in what appears to be an incorruptible man and that failing turns out to be ‘he’s a ratting gent.’
Ratting is the brutal sport of betting on terriers in a pit with rats and wagering on how many rats the dog can kill.
Crichton says on the laserdisc commentary that he was unaware that they would be filming actual ratting until they reached the set but if he knew in advance or not I still find it reprehensible. The sequences served no greater purpose in the film than to uncover this man weakness. It was not an advancement of the protagonist’s emotional growth or understanding, it was not to shock sensibility into the audience. It is a cruelty that I consider wholly unjustified.
I am conflicted about the hunt in Wake in Fright but not at all about the ratting in The Great Train Robbery. Film is wonderful and wonderous, but it does not justify abuse and cruelty to animals or people.
