Day Twenty-Three: A Mild Romero Sermon Masquerading as a Review of Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Essential. Iconic. Let’s go ahead and say a few more unoriginal things about George A. Romero’s debut, Night of the Living Dead. The film is one of the greatest of all horror pictures, and, unlike some, I respect the importance of such a statement. Night of the Living Dead is one of those perfect, wonderful accidents where the usual disadvantages of a making a movie (any movie, much less one of a significantly low budget) are blessings.
Dead looks like a home movie you might find in your attic one day. Something that documents an attack that went undocumented amongst all the other outrages of the time, such as Kent State, or the assassination of Martin Luther King. Imagine your grandfather, in the midst of boring you with a family history, suddenly saying “and this was the day your aunt ate your grandmother on your father’s side.”
This sort of macabre humor permeates Night of the Living Dead, though, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it doesn’t defuse the horror. The film has a strong script that feeds you bite size portions of exposition at just the right moments, amping the dread and violence as the dead slowly close in on our heroes. I’ve seen many films that attempt to dramatize the falling apart of a group, but few are as convincing as Dead. It has something to do with the total lack of artifice here, the performances are clipped and efficient, the dialogue unshowy. People say what they might actually say in this situation, not what a screenwriter needs them to say to ensure that his name is remembered for another project.
Romero would go on to push it further in subsequent films, but I find the scene where the ghouls eat whats left of the characters that have blown up in the truck to be one of the more unsettling scenes of violence I’ve ever seen, much less of Romero’s oeuvre. The gore is there, but its teasingly just out of sight. The creatures munch the guts in the shadows, and you catch a little glimpse of something and wonder if that was a stomach lining you just saw the creature eating. In Dawn, or Day, this question is resolutely answered.
With Dawn of the Dead, Romero would begin to push the series towards a more purposeful satire. His zombies are as much a joke as menace here, and he manipulates the tones with the seeming ease of a master. I’m a little split on the Dead pictures, I think Dawn of the Dead is the best film of the series, while Night is the sweat inducing, pretense free, single minded shocker of the bunch.
The satire or subversiveness of Night never takes reign over the story, and some have claimed that the pereceived commentary that Night offers on 1960s war torn, racially cancerous America was largely arrived at by accident anyway. This doesn’t really matter much either way, Romero made a film that caught the zeitgeist at the time, and could fuel one hundred different imaginations to go one hundred different ways with it. He didn’t have that level of trust in the other pictures, and it finally got a little out of control with his most recent, Land of the Dead, a God awful preachfest that was inexplicably acclaimed in certain circles.
A zombie learning to speak (sort of) English and recognizing that he has rights? Not scary. A zombie that’s a feral thing that’s all lumbering instinct that looks like your sister? Scary. A zombie that actually is your sister that you catch eating your dad in the basement? The stuff that nightmares are made of. We don’t need to have our nightmares rationalized for us, the nightmares and the real co-mingle in a way that’s best, at least in art, left in the realm of the sub-conscious. Romero once knew that, and his crude, low budget, little shocker is the one of great American horror movies. It doesn’t matter if the zombies are eating us out of social protest or not, what matters is that they’re eating us.
Review: The Producers (1968)
“The Producers” is about a Broadway producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and a frustrated accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) who conspire together to stage the worst play in the world, so they can pocket a bunch of old ladies’ money and live the good life. As Bialystock sees it, this is a no brainer, he’s been staging flops for years, only this time he’ll actually get paid for it, and can be redeemed (though that’s a poor word choice, one doesn’t think Bialystock is too interested in being redeemed from anything) from a life of sleeping with woman old enough to be his dead grandmother. All he has to do, Bloom tells him, is sell much more stock in the play than available, produce a horrendous flop at a tenth the budget that closes in a night, and sprint to an island of your choosing. Of course, it doesn’t go this way, because, as my father is fond of saying, if it did there would be no movie.
“The Producers”’s set up sounds like a comic noir, the sort of thing that we sometimes get from the Coen Brothers, but this is the legendary debut comedy from writer-director Mel Brooks, who went on to become an institution in the genre with films such as “Blazing Saddles”, “Young Frankenstein” and, for people closer to my generation, the Star Wars spoof “Spaceballs”. Brooks is hit or miss, and “The Producers” encapsulates everything we’d see in his future in just under ninety minutes.
The first third is shrill, loud, screeching, dreadful, think the worst of Billy Wilder’s comedy work (”One, Two, Three”, perhaps) crossed with a Neil Simon annoyance of your choice. Brooks mistakes loud for funny in this section, and you may find yourself tempted to turn the volume down or turn the damn thing off entirely. Turn it down, but don’t turn it off, because, at about minute forty, Bialystock and Bloom, after finding their suitably atrocious play (the now legendary “Springtime for Hitler”) knock on the door of fruity, clueless theatre director, Roger De Bris (played by a pre-Mr. Belevedere Christopher Hewitt, a precursor to Christopher Guest’s Corky St. Clair) and the whole thing shakes loose of the stagey grip Brooks has had on the proceedings up until this point. “The Producers” becomes funny, real funny, with more classic lines in a five minute clip than I could keep up with. (My favorite has to be De Bris’s “I never realized the Third Reich meant Germany! This is filled with historical goodies like that!)
Bialystock, Bloom, and De Bris then find their Fuhrer in a fellow named L.S.D (Dick Shawn, who’s performance is like The Fonz if he dropped the ’50s thing for a more ’60s “its cool daddy yo” vibe) and “The Producers jumps the rails, drops a tab that’s probably in L.S.D.’s back pocket and becomes something more free form, organic and surreal. The awkward set ups of the long, nearly laughless first third begin to clash and bang against one another like billiard balls, and reconfigure into something delightful weird, just a dash off from what you expected, culminating in a set piece of zonked out brilliance, the performance of “Springtime for Hitler”, which is like Grease crossed with Triumph of the Will as restaged by Busby Berkeley.
The performances are largely good, but take some getting used to, the film is so over the top you have to a take a nip, process, and then move on. Zero Mostel powers the first third, and invests his lines with an animal vulgarity that’s hard to shake; when he addresses his secretary as a “Swedish tease” you think he’s saying something truly dirty. Gene Wilder, overall, is disappointingly underused, but he invests the character with a pathos, a rumpled lonely dignity, that can be found in even his most bizarre characterizations. Wilder does get the one real laugh that occurs in the first act, a hissy fit over his valued childhood blanket, and another memorable non-sequitir in the third, when Bloom, realizing that Bialystock and himself are doomed to a successful play, screams at Bialystock: “Fatty! You Fatty! Fat! Fat! Your Fat!”
Brooks doesn’t know how to end his film. “The Producers” doesn’t so much conclude as stop, but by this point you’ve witnessed so much nearly hallicinatory comic snap that it hardly matters.
