Response
When did the film premiere?
Wake in Fright
The world premiere of "Wake in Fright" (as "Outback") occurred at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, held in May. Ted Kotcheff was nominated for a Golden Palm Award. The film opened commercially in France on 22 July 1971, Great Britain on 29 October 1971, Australia during the same month and the United States on 20 February 1972. "Wake in Fright" received generally excellent reviews throughout the world and found a favourable public response in France (where it ran for five months) and in the United Kingdom. However, despite receiving such critical support at Cannes and in Australia, "Wake in Fright" suffered poor domestic box-office returns. Although there were complaints that the film's distributor, United Artists, had failed to promote the film successfully, it was also thought that the film was “perhaps too uncomfortably direct and uncompromising to draw large Australian audiences". During an early Australian screening, one man stood up, pointed at the screen and protested "That's not us! ", to which Jack Thompson yelled back "Sit down, mate. It is us. "The un-restored version of "Wake in Fright" received a three stars (out of four) rating from the American film reviewer Leonard Maltin in his "2006 Movie Guide", while Brian McFarlane, writing in 1999 in "The Oxford Companion to Australian Film", said that it was “almost uniquely unsettling in the history of new Australian Cinema”. Askmen.com echoed these sentiments, citing that "it's not hard to see why the dusty savagery and clown-faced surrealism of Ted Kotcheff's fourth feature was never shown on telly at the time. "Following the film's restoration, "Wake in Fright" screened at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival on 15 May 2009 when it was selected as a Cannes Classic title by the head of the department, Martin Scorsese. "Wake in Fright" is one of only two films ever to screen twice in the history of the festival. Scorsese said, ""Wake in Fright" is a deeply -- and I mean deeply -- unsettling and disturbing movie. I saw it when it premiered at Cannes in 1971, and it left me speechless. Visually, dramatically, atmospherically and psychologically, it's beautifully calibrated and it gets under your skin one encounter at a time, right along with the protagonist played by Gary Bond. I'm excited that "Wake in Fright" has been preserved and restored and that it is finally getting the exposure it deserves. "Roger Ebert reviewed the re-release and said "It's not dated. It is powerful, genuinely shocking and rather amazing. It comes billed as a 'horror film' and contains a great deal of horror, but all of the horror is human and brutally realistic." Don Groves of SBS gave the film four stars out of five, claiming that ""Wake in Fright" deserves to rank as an Australian classic as it packs enormous emotional force, was bravely and inventively directed, and features superb performances. " Rex Reed, an early advocate of "Wake in Fright", praised the film's restoration as "the best movie news of the year", and said it "may be the greatest Australian film ever made". Currently, the film has a rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 42 reviews.