Australia

• Wake in Fright

From nowhere he came, through hell he went.
Based on journalist Kenneth Cook's best-selling novel. A young teacher, John Grant (Gary Bond), arrives by chance at the remote mining town, Bundanyabba, in the Australian outback. There, he is befriended by the resident police constable (Chips Rafferty); a local citizen, Tim Hynes (Al Thomas); his love-starved daughter Janette (Sylvia Kay); and Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasance), an alcoholic dropout. To begin with, Grant finds their drinking, gambling, quarrelsome and lecherous lifestyles positively primitive and unsavoury. But when he joins the doctor and a couple of his uncouth friends on a kangaroo safari, to his astonishment, Grant finds himself even joining in with their antics. In the process of self-recognition, the young teacher is taught some brutal, humiliating and unexpected home truths about himself.