Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane

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СКАЧАТЬ Ron O’Neal (Superfly), who would soon change forever the image of black men on screen. While he earned audience support, Jones’s Ben made for an unusually harsh “hero,” even shooting an unarmed Harry Cooper in cold blood (though it would be hard to say he didn’t deserve it).

      But that was a large part of the point: Ben wasn’t a hero. He was an average guy, an everyman of any ethnic stripe, who simply reacted to an irrational situation with strong survival instincts and a competence that, though far from infallible, surpassed that of his five adult companions trapped in that zombie-besieged farmhouse.

      Since Ben’s character was written sans a specific ethnicity, there’s never any overt reference to race in the film—not even in those heated shouting matches between Ben and Harry (though one senses the ever-seething Harry’s unvoiced bigotry). Yet the character’s black identity undeniably adds another layer of anger to the pair’s ferocious battles for alpha-dog status. Ben’s blackness also lent greater tension to his relationship with the alternately comatose and hysterical Barbara. As Russ Streiner admits, “We knew that there would probably be a bit of controversy, just from the fact that an African-American man and a white woman are holed up in a farmhouse.” When Barbara claws at her clothes, citing the house’s unbearable heat, the scene suggests a subtext of sexual repression and fear. John Russo points out: “And then she falls into his arms. And I know that a lot of the bigots in the country are going to be thinking, ‘Oh my God, now what’s he going to do? He’s got this white woman in his arms,’ and lays her down on the couch and he unfastens her coat…and so I was aware that it might have those kind of vibes.”

      A panicky Barbara then angrily lashes out. “It was written in the script that Barbara was to smack Ben at least three times,” says actress Judith O’Dea. “But this was a very sensitive issue for Duane Jones at that time and he said, ‘I can accept being smacked once. But I don’t want to play it the way that you’ve written it.’ It was rewritten…I gave him a smack. And he gave me the fist—right in the face.” When Ben punches Barbara, a white woman—this before Poitier’s groundbreaking smack of a racist aristocrat (Larry Gates) in In the Heat of the Night—that act supplied another envelope-pushing note to the proceedings. Those scenes provoked palpable reactions in audiences of the day.

      Jones himself had opposed the punch, rejecting the idea that Ben would behave in so violent a manner. Russo concurs with that evaluation, “It really is out of character for him to hit her, but we needed him to because we had to get her unconscious for the sake of the plot. The truck driver, the other character, would have hit her.”

      Jones, in general, proved notably nonviolent. Says Romero: “He hated any kind of firearm—he really hated that gun. So we had to have somebody hand it to him. It had to be taken from him right after. He had to take one of the boards off the wall and he hit my camera. He couldn’t work for like an hour!”

      Jones received on-the-job gun training from jack-of-all-trades Lee Hartman, who did quadruple duty as a background reporter in the newsroom scenes, a funeral-suited zombie, and a posse member: “Duane Jones never shot a rifle before, so I let him have mine. I said, ‘Keep it against your shoulder.’ It was a 30–30 rifle. ‘Aim it at the bottom of that tree there.’ He was aiming at the top. ‘It’s gonna go a mile and a half if you miss it.’ He had a real bullet in there; we didn’t have any blanks.” Despite his antipathy toward weapons, Jones quickly got the hang of it.

      One thing the actor consistently did not want to back down from was his character’s color. “Duane actually thought we should take note of it,” says Romero. “Now I think we probably should have. Not to make it a big point, but to refer to it at least. We had written this guy as angry for no reason at all. But that automatic rage that comes out, that would have been an interesting overlay. Duane was the only one who knew this.” Romero also allowed that if they had consciously played the race card, the results might have been heavy-handed, disrupting Night’s delicate balance.

      At one point, when the filmmakers considered lensing an alternate ending that would permit Ben to survive, it was again Duane Jones who stood firm. “I convinced George that the black community would rather see me dead than saved, after all that had gone on, in a corny and symbolically confusing way.” Besides, said Jones, “The heroes never die in American movies. The jolt of that and the double jolt of the hero figure being black seemed like a double-barreled whammy.”

      Many audiences perceived the parallel between America’s increasingly violent civil rights struggles—particularly, the then-recent assassination of Martin Luther King by racist hitman James Earl Ray, with the suspected cooperation of the FBI—and Ben’s execution at the guns of the redneck posse at film’s end. Without a black actor in the lead, Night would still have been an innovative shocker but wouldn’t have hit the cultural nerves it did.

      In 1987, shortly before his premature death from heart failure the following year, Jones granted Fangoria journalist Tim Ferrante an extremely rare, exclusive in-depth interview, wherein the actor—who’d largely shunned his association with the cult hit, adopting something of a “Ben there, done that” attitude—revealed his feelings about working on the then-twenty-year-old film: “Even when I wanted people to leave me alone about it, I never regretted that I did it. I remember it as great fun. We worked very hard. There was a wonderful feeling of camaraderie and good humor and goodwill. They were very considerate people to work for. You never felt that you were being abused or misused. They used to have to drive me back to my parents’ home, all the way out to Duquesne, every night. Jack Russo, usually. He never did that begrudgingly. They were wonderful folks to work for. They really were.”

      Jones owned up to having problems with many critics’ perception of the film. “The thing that used to bother me the most was that interviewers just assumed that we were a bunch of amateur actors. It was an interesting mix of amateurs and professional actors, which was even more clever on George’s part.” Jones also had high praise for the filmmaking approach. “The best storytelling in the world goes on in commercials. So there was that cleanliness and very sharp editorial eye that went into it. Internally, in the film itself, they captured somehow an independent aura. If you really look at it technically, it was most professionally done.”

      In that same interview, Jones conjured a rare sour moment, a negative incident that had haunted him for two decades. “I guess because everything was so pleasant that one of the things that sticks out in my mind is a moment that was strangely unpleasant. There was a point where George and the crew were planning a shot and setting up. It was getting to be late afternoon, evening, and this magnificent butterfly wandered into the house. I remember clearly that it landed on the far wall. And to a person, every single one of us stopped what we were doing and we were just standing around admiring this beautiful, beautiful creature that had just come in as a spirit among us and attached itself to the wall. Soon it was time to get started and someone thought that his idea of a joke would be to come and smash the butterfly. I remember the stunned silence of the group, and the visceral reaction of wanting to regurgitate was just so real that that moment sticks out in my mind that it was out of synch with everything. Nobody could believe that he had done that to us—and to the butterfly. I don’t think we ever quite convinced him that it was a horrible thing to do.”

      Though Jones would go on to appear in several subsequent regional and New York City films—most notably as an academic vampire opposite Marlene Clark in Bill Gunn’s 1973 cult fave Ganja and Hess (“another underground classic,” Jones once stated, “one of the most beautifully shot films of that period”)—Hollywood didn’t come calling. Nor were any other Night players summoned. Jones had his own theory on that subject. “For whatever reasons, the reality of who we were in the first place was never clear. Critics assumed we were all a group of amateurs from Pittsburgh. The so-called ‘amateur’ they decided to bestow professionalism on was George Romero. I would never for one second begrudge George any of his acclaim and fame. But some of us could have used another kind of boost to our career, whereas nobody ever assumed we СКАЧАТЬ