Movies
Related: About this forumJust watched Night of the Living Dead (1968) for the first time
Saw bits of it on TV as a child, but never the whole thing until last night.
It inspired a bit of research:
Something odd happens when Barbra, played by Judith ODea, first lays eyes on Ben, played by Duane Jones, from underneath her still-intact flipped, blonde bob. She drops the theatrics and stiffens, growing still for the first time in the film. It is clear to our eye and to hers that this man does not resemble the bruised and pockmarked undead that are encroaching upon the house. Yet, the look on her face isnt one of relief, but rather perturbation and bewilderment.
Bens abrupt arrival into the movie provokes a quieter yet no less reflexive fear in Barbra, whose debutante looks suggest someone whose parents would have probably placed a Nixon sign in their front yard. She is unquestionably shocked by the presence of this Black man to the point that she cant take her eyes off him. Once Ben has pushed both of them back into the safety of the house and locked the door behind them, her gaze follows him suspiciously around the room as he gets down to the zombie-busting business at hand. Amid Barbras shock, Romero pulls off one of the slyest, neatest transformations in cinema, revealing Ben as not only a protagonist on a par with Barbra but, ultimately, the true hero of this horror classic.
In a feat of color-blind casting, Jones, a thirty-one-year-old acting student from New York, auditioned for and nabbed the role of Ben, a character whose race had never been specified in Romeros script. When asked about his decision to cast an African American actor as the gallant center of a film with an otherwise all-white cast, Romero said, Duane Jones was the best actor we met to play Ben Consciously I resisted writing new dialogue cause he happens to be black. We just shot the script. Before he died in 1988 at the all-too-early age of fifty-one, Jones had lived many lives as an actor, an academic administrator, an educator, a scholar, a director, and an executive overseer of the Black Theatre Alliance. He worked on just nine films in his lifetime, including Bill Gunns perverse vampiric romance Ganja & Hess (1973) and Kathleen Collinss groundbreaking independent drama Losing Ground (1982).
The rest:
https://www.cineaste.com/spring2021/remembering-duane-jones-a-boundary-breaking-black-actor
marble falls
(61,758 posts)... if you tell anyone how much I like it, I will deny it indignantly.
wryter2000
(47,260 posts)Was the night of Nixon's Saturday night massacre.
I love this movie. It was so weird when the hero died in the end.
Polly Hennessey
(7,370 posts)Junipercity
(25 posts)I had to do a paper last year on Martin Seligman's 1947 paper on Resilience Theory for a Family Theories class.
A 1,000 watt light bulb went off in my head! Some months earlier I had found a new favorite classic movie! It had inspired me to research the film.
The 1946 film "The Best Years of Our Lives" Directed by William Wyler, starring Myrna LoyDana Andrews and Fredric March, WAS Seligmans Resilience theory!
I got the approval to submit my paper as an extended film clip, than began the torturous process of editing the three hour film down to one hour. It's such an excellent film! I had to largely cut two of the three story lines.
It absolutely blew the class away! Also earned me an "A".
John1956PA
(3,291 posts). . . wound regard her as just "HoHum Judy" until they found out that she was Barbara in that movie.
He unscripted, impromptu performance in some scenes in that movie is highly regarded.
marked50
(1,434 posts)La Coliniere
(692 posts)in 1968 as a young teen and never forget the impact of this film. My dad was a horror movie fanatic and had been taking my brother and me to see them all since we were young kids (most horror films back then would today get a pg or pg13 rating today). I knew as soon as Night of the Living Dead ended that it was a horror film masterpiece. Never saw anything as hair raising and impactful. It still holds up today and remains the best zombie movie of all time, as well as a top 10 horror film, up there with Psycho and Rosemarys Baby. George Romeros Dawn of the Dead is also a great sequel.