ATLRetro

by Anthony Taylor
Contributing Writer

Welcome to Apes on Film! This column exists to scratch your retro-film-in-high-definition itch. We’ll be reviewing new releases of vintage cinema and television on disc of all genres, finding gems and letting you know the skinny on what to avoid. Here at Apes on Film, our aim is to uncover the best in retro film. As we dig for artifacts, we’ll do our best not to bury our reputation. What will we find out here? Our destiny.

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK – (1975) – 4K UHD + BRD
4.5 out of 5 Bananas
Starring: Rachel Roberts, Anne-Louise Lambert, Vivean Gray
Director: Peter Weir
Rated: NR
Studio: Criterion Collection
Region: 4k UHD – Region Free, BRD – Region A Locked
BRD Release Date: 04/09/2024
Audio Format: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Video Codec: Native 4K HDR: HDR10
Resolution: 2160p
Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1 Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Run Time: 107 minutes
CLICK HERE TO ORDER

Australia had a fairly robust film production industry between the great wars, but when J. Arthur Rank bought up the largest theater chains after WWII and discouraged local production the industry went fallow, producing an average of only two films a year from 1946 until 1969. Finally, in 1973 the government funded the new Australian Film, Television, and Radio School and the dam was broken. New talent flooded in to learn the craft of filmmaking and the beginning of what would be called the Australian New Wave began as names like Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong, George Miller, Philip Noyce, and Peter Weir began producing their own films for local and international distribution. Weir began his trade in the late 1960s making short films and television programs and made a critical breakthrough with his first feature, THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS (1974). His next film would gain international acclaim and a gave him a reputation for mesmerizing work that goes against the traditions of storytelling in reaching for something deeper, something resonant even if unrecognizable.

Based on Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel of the same name, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK is a period piece set in 1900 that begins with a student outing from a girl’s school in Victoria to a local rock formation. After lunch, as most of the teachers and girls nap, three students explore the formation and mysteriously disappear, as does one of the teachers. Questions are asked, investigations are made, an inquiry is called, and both teachers and students search for answers to questions they never thought to ask until their disappearance. Theories abound, suggestions and inferences are made, accusations bubble to the surface; but no answers come. When one of the students is found alive but with no memory of what happened to herself or the others, the mystery and sense of horror at what might have befallen the girls intensifies.

Weir has publicly said how disappointed he was by the dull outcomes of Hitchcock films (the Butler did it!), as well as the simple explanations offered by Sherlock Holmes to the complex mysteries he solved, so he eschewed tying the film’s mystery up at the end into a neat bow as a present to the viewer. He expects us to enjoy the journey and never care for the destination, which will certainly rile audiences with an appetite for standard storytelling conventions. No comforting Campbellian moments or traditional mythical narrative tropes are applied in a broad manner in PICNIC, we have to understand that the questions are the answers Weir wishes us to savor.

The film’s setting in the year 1900 is thematically important. Just as America faced a “New Frontier” in which no one and nothing was safe after the assassination of JFK in 1963, the Victorian age was ending, and the future was an enigma to Britons all over the world at the turn of the century. It was a time in which everything was open to change, and opinion and influence no longer made any difference in one’s personal outcome. Weir embraces the enigma rather than the explanation, and invites viewers to do the same; ”What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream” says doomed girl Miranda (quoting Edgar Allan Poe), played by Anne-Louise Lambert, at the opening of the film. And like the layers of dreams within dreams, the story of Hanging Rock unfolds, but never unveils. It echoes the zeitgeist of a people surrounded by harsh terrain and aboriginal mysticism, ruled at a distance by a monarch in her final months.

Instead, the film lingers on images, on sounds, expressions, and texture. The cinematography of Russell Boyd is soft and layered, dreamlike in places as the story is, a perfect contextual pairing. His work on Weir’s later films benefits from his experiences here, in combining layered atmosphere with a thematically based documentary style to create a harmonic visual resonance at almost imperceptible levels.

Criterion Collection’s presentation of PICNIC is sourced from a new 4K restoration from the original camera negative supervised and approved by Director Weir and Director of Photography Boyd, and feels both delicate and robust at the same time – delicate because of the nature of the visuals, and robust in color, tonal density, and texture. The package includes a 4K UHD disc as well as a Blu-ray. Also included are an interview with Weir; a program on the making of the film, featuring interviews with Executive Producer Patricia Lovell, Producers Hal McElroy and Jim McElroy, and cast members; an introduction by film scholar David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film; an on-set documentary hosted by Lovell and featuring interviews with Weir, actor Rachel Roberts and source-novel author Joan Lindsay; HOMESDALE (1971), a black comedy by Weir; the original trailer; an essay by author Megan Abbott; and an excerpt from film scholar Marek Haltof’s 1996 book Peter Weir: When Cultures Collide. The 4k disc is region free, and the Blu-ray is Region A locked.

This movie is considered to be the best Australian film of all time by most of the Australian film industry, critics, and academia. Like the questions it poses regarding its central incident, unanswered and never ending, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK embeds itself within you. And though it may slip from thought for years at a time, it never fades.

Anthony Taylor is not only the Minister of Science, but also Defender of the Faith. His reviews and articles have appeared in magazines such as Screem, Fangoria, Retro Fan, Famous Monsters of Filmland, SFX, Video WatcH*Dog, and many more. He is the author of the book The Art of George Wilson from Hermes Press.

Ape caricature art by Richard Smith.

Portions of this review were previously published in Screem Magazine.

WAKE IN FRIGHT (1971); Dir: Ted Kotcheff; Starring Gary Bond, Donald Pleasence and Chips Rafferty; Through Dec. 13 at Landmark Midtown Art Cinema; Dec. 14-20 at The Plaza Theatre. Trailer here; Tickets here (visit website for prices and showtimes).

By Aleck Bennett
Contributing Writer

“Have a drink, mate? Have a fight, mate? Have some dust and sweat, mate? There’s nothing else out here.”
– WAKE IN FRIGHT poster tagline

The 1970s and 1980s were ground zero for a renaissance in Australian filmmaking. Beginning December 7, Landmark Midtown Art Cinema offers a rare chance for you to witness one of the groundbreaking films that sparked that boom: Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film WAKE IN FRIGHT.

In the late 1960s, the film industry in Australia was basically nonexistent. To remedy this, John Gorton (Australia’s Prime Minster from 1968-1971) set into motion several policies and governmental agencies to promote local filmmaking. Sensing a need for native Australian film, local production companies began collaborating with outside studios in the first few years of Gorton’s administration, the most notable results being Michael Powell’s AGE OF CONSENT (1969), Tony Richardson’s NED KELLY (1970), Nicolas Roeg’s WALKABOUT (1971) and Ted Kotcheff’s WAKE IN FRIGHT.

Both Powell’s and Richardson’s films were critical and commercial failures, and as a result, didn’t contribute much to the notion of Australia as a hotbed of cinematic activity. Roeg’s WALKABOUT, on the other hand, was a critical and commercial triumph, yet its authenticity as a truly representative Australian film was in dispute immediately upon release. It was based on a novel by British author James Vance Marshall, featured a screenplay written by British playwright Edward Bond, was directed by British director Nic Roeg, starred his son alongside British actress Jenny Agutter, was produced by American businessmen Max Raab and Si Litvinoff (whose production company was incorporated in Australia), financed with funds raised in America and distributed by US-based company 20th Century Fox.

WAKE IN FRIGHT, however, sported a much more authentic Aussie pedigree. Whereas WALKABOUT used the Australian outback as primarily a vehicle for Roeg’s surreal vision, WAKE IN FRIGHT engaged the oppressive landscape as almost a character in itself. Based on the 1961 novel by Australian journalist Kenneth Cook and based on his own experiences, the screenplay by British writer Evan Jones—who consulted with Cook on its creation—hewed as closely to the original text as possible. The story finds a young schoolteacher from the city, John Grant (Gary Bond), posted to a tiny school in the outback town of Tiboonda. As the Christmas holiday begins, he plans to take a flight to Sydney to visit his girlfriend, but finds himself waylaid at a train station in the nearby mining town of Bundanyabba (aka “the Yabba”) as he waits to make the flight. After getting sucked into the hard-drinking ways of the townspeople, he loses his money gambling, loses his chance to make his plane…and slowly begins to lose his mind.

Jack Thompson in WAKE IN FRIGHT (1971), Drafthouse Films.

The screenplay was initially to be filmed in 1963 by Joseph Losey, with whom Jones had collaborated on the ’63 Hammer film THE DAMNED. A lack of financial backing doomed the project, and the screenplay was kicked around for nearly a decade. In 1968, Jones collaborated with Canadian director Ted Kotcheff (FIRST BLOOD, UNCOMMON VALOR, NORTH DALLAS FORTY) and felt that the director would be a good match for the screenplay. Kotcheff fell in love with the script, and immediately set about the business of raising funds and casting the film.

Kotcheff arrived with his family in Australia in 1969, determined to soak up Aussie culture in order to more realistically depict the people and locations described in the novel and screenplay. With his assistant director Howard Rubie, Kotcheff explored the worlds of illegal casinos, kangaroo hunters, Returned Services League veterans’ clubs, and the blue-collar pubs of dock workers and the like. As Kotcheff related to Australia’s National Film & Sound Archive, the pair sought out the kind of places “whose clientele clock off work at 6 a.m. and are heavily into the drinking by 9 a.m.—we did a lot of drinking.”

In many cases, it takes an outsider’s eye to catch details or present a perspective that might be glossed over by one more familiar with a place or subject. In this instance, Ted Kotcheff perfectly captures the bleakness of life in the outback before the internet, decent roads and efficient train and plane travel increased connectivity. In this much larger world, everything and everyone bakes in the 100-degree weather, and dust coats every surface. Likewise, an attitude of aggressive friendliness also coats the culture of drinking, gambling and game hunting that pervades the community. And in the Yabba, the mateship and seemingly out-of-place Christmas decorations also mask the sinister and menacing eye cast upon the outsider in its midst.

Donald Pleasance in WAKE IN FRIGHT (1971) Drafthouse Films.

The film opened in Sydney to worldwide acclaim. Ted Kotcheff was nominated for the Palm D’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival, and the film was tremendously commercially successful in France and Great Britain. However, it failed to find an audience in Australia. Said co-star Jack Thompson in the 2008 documentary NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY OF OZPLOITATION!, “Australians at the time didn’t want to see it (the film) as Australia. People would walk away saying ‘That’s not us. We don’t behave like that.’” Kotcheff counters, “As a foreigner, you see things that Australians take for granted or accept as part of the dailiness of their life. They don’t see what’s eccentric or idiosyncratic about their life.”

However, the critical and (at least overseas) commercial success of WAKE IN FRIGHT and WALKABOUT lent credence to the notion that Australia was indeed a place to be taken seriously as a cinematic force. Jack Thompson confirms this, saying “What they provided was the knowledge for would-be Australian filmmakers that we had the ability to tell tales about ourselves in a way that was dynamic and interesting.”

In the wake of these early films came what would be known as the Australian New Wave of cinema, producing such soon-to-be-internationally-known talents as directors Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, John Duigan and Fred Schepisi. The exploitative elements of WAKE IN FRIGHT (released stateside as OUTBACK) also proved to be influential in the development of what would later be known as “Ozsploitation.” Filmmakers such as George Miller, Russell Mulcahy and Richard Franklin seized upon the needs of the action and horror marketplace that was opened up by WAKE IN FRIGHT with films like MAD MAX, MAD MAX 2: THE ROAD WARRIOR, RAZORBACK and ROAD GAMES. Echoes of WAKE IN FRIGHT’s depiction of building dread can be found in films as recent as Aussie Greg Mclean’s 2005 film WOLF CREEK.

For years, the film WAKE IN FRIGHT was thought to be essentially lost. While it was released on VHS in the US, prints of the film were nearly impossible to find. 16mm prints of the movie were found, but were in poor condition for screening. The only full 35mm print of the movie, which was found in Dublin, was deemed to be of insufficient quality for commercial release. The film’s editor, Anthony Buckley, began searching for the film’s original elements in 1996. After years and years of false leads, prolonged negotiations with foreign rights holders and digging through cut and mangled prints of the movie, Buckley found the original film negatives in a shipping container marked “For Destruction.” Were it not for his efforts, the film would be nearly impossible to see today. Australia’s National Film & Sound Archive completed a full digital restoration in 2009, and premiered the new print at the Sydney Film Festival that year. It was later selected by Martin Scorsese as a Cannes Classic and was screened at that year’s Cannes Film Festival—with Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA, it is one of only two films to ever be screened twice at Cannes.

Brutal in its honesty, bleak in its vision and startlingly original in its approach, WAKE IN FRIGHT is a long-hidden masterpiece of cinema, ranking with the best of the Australian New Wave and transcending even that pigeonholing. It’s where the Australian filmmaking renaissance started, and set a nearly impossible standard for all that followed.

Aleck Bennett is a writer, blogger, pug warden, pop culture enthusiast, raconteur and bon vivant from the greater Atlanta area. Visit his blog at doctorsardonicus.wordpress.com