Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Night of the Living Dead is an intense film.  It starts out bleak, turns horrific when the zombies attack, and becomes hopeless when man turns against humanity.  The formula might now be unoriginal but the power this 50 year old film retains is stronger than any horror film made since.  The fact is Night of the Living Dead is the most important horror film ever made.

Zombies attack; that is the basic plot for most undead survival horror pictures, but George Romero’s original 1968 film uses zombies more like a Hitchcock MacGuffin.  Barbara and her brother Johnny travel hours outside of Pittsburg to leave flowers in a cemetery.  Johnny jokes about her being afraid.  A man attacks.  Johnny fights him and Barbara runs away.  The man pursues and chases Barbara to an abandoned house in an isolated rural area.  This is the set up.  Ben arrives and takes refuge in the house.  By now Barbara is hysterical and incoherent and paralyzed.  Ben boards up the house as zombies group outside.  Down in the basement another group of survivors led by Mr. Cooper.  They don’t come to until they are certain danger is absent.  Cooper and Ben disagree with their course of action.  Cooper wants to barricade in the cellar.  Ben feels they stand a fighting chance upstairs where there is food and radio, and where they can observe their surroundings and maybe get away if need be.  The tension develops between who is right.

The first glimpse I ever had of Night of the Living Dead was in a horror tribute special hosted by Vincent Price in the 1980s.  It was called “Creepy Classics”.  Price provided campy commentary in between movie clips, and the first sequence shown was the cemetery scene.  I was scared by the film and did not see it complete for another 10 or so years.  I always thought Barbara was the star of the piece.  The last image I had of the film was her running into the lonely house—a shelter from the undead—and never imagined that the film could shift focus from the zombies to the horror that the human characters create.

The film sets up immediately an uneasy relationship to death: the cemetery sign has bullet holes shot into it, a foreshadowing of just how easy and dismissive death will become in this tale.  We also are uncertain of who Barbara and her brother are leaving flowers for.  Is it their father or grandfather?  We know through their conversation that the deceased is close to their mother who is too old to make the trip, but Johnny claims he cannot remember the person.  He surely could remember his own father.  That both show, in their own ways, such a distance from the dead man led me to believe it was a grandfather buried in the cemetery, especially when Johnny reminds his sister that his grandfather said he would be damned to hell for scaring Barbara in the very same cemetery when they were kids.  The set up is misleading, and must have been in 1968 when such a film was new and unbearably terrorizing—there is no way to expect that in the very first scene, led into with an impersonation of horror icon Vincent Price (“They’re coming to get you, Barbara”) that a zombie will attack the defenseless people.

Night of the Living Dead began what was, up until 2005, a trilogy known as “Undead”.  George Romero wrote and directed a series of films about human behavior in the face of catastrophe.  Night seems less a satire than the following films.  It fact there are no laughs in the picture.  It’s pretty grim.  But one bit of commentary, which leads to a death we hate to witness, looks ahead to Dawn of the Dead.  As the human race outside the isolated house discovers how to kill the zombies, their behavior becomes very monotonous.  They roam the field killings zombies dead.  They become so robotic, hypnotized by their repetitive ritual that they never check if those they’re shooting are the undead or civilians.  I will say no more, but at the destitute mood at the end of the picture I thought to myself that with a little more care something more positive might have happened.

Back to my initial impressions as a kid—I was disappointed to see that Barbara is killed by the very man whose death made her catatonic.  The finale, which I will not spoil, now, after I don’t know how many viewings, is still chilling.  Forget any idea of the film being a metaphor for racism—it is chilling to think that if everybody in that house listened to Mr. Cooper and hid in the cellar, they would have gotten out alive...well, maybe.  That the most despicable and cowardly man in the cast turned out to be right all along, and to a lesser extent what happens to Duane, make us doubt everything we know about the world.

I will say after my latest viewing, I was still shrunken in my chair.  I don’t think I had moved for the final 15 minutes—I am still stunned by this picture; it was not safe to move.  I felt safer contorted in my seat.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Director: George A. Romero

Writers: John A. Russo & George A. Romero

Stars: Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea, and Karl Hardman

USA

In English

Runtime: 96 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063350/

Stolen Kisses (1968, Baisers volés)

It is said that the average person will change professions several times in his life. There may be many reasons for change, but it is sad when one’s own character prevents him from charting a course and sticking to it. Antoine Doinel, the hero of The 400 Blows, has not quite grown up. Let me rephrase that: Antoine and his environment are changing at different speeds. When once Antoine’s insolence was charming, as an adult it is clear he may never find his way. But is that as sad as I think? In between his gigs as a soldier, a concierge, a detective, a stock boy in a shoe store and a television repair man (I think I’ve got them all) there is always love, sweet, impulsive love. In this regard Antoine will never age.

François Truffaut’s major preoccupation was romantic longing. We see it in every one of his pictures: Two English Girls and A Woman Next Door are both about obsession; in The Bride Wore Black love manifests itself as revenge for a lost love; Fahrenheit 451 details the love of books, and The 400 Blows was the love of childhood, of cinema, of friendship and liberty, all also themes in Truffaut’s work. In Stolen Kisses his themes clash in ways the director might never had hoped for. In the summer of ‘68, France experienced a revolution begun by students fed up with poor conditions in state-run universities. Riots and demonstrations (often one and the same) shut down industries; unions joined in the students’ struggles, and when the government appointed a new director for The Cinematheque Francais, ousting founder Henri Langlois, filmmakers joined in.

Langlois was one of the two most important people in Truffaut’s upbringing, along with Andre Bazin, film theorist and co-founder of Cashiers du cinema, the underground film magazine that Truffaut wrote for as a critic. Langlois, apart from single handedly preserving films that otherwise would no longer exist, gave Truffaut the opportunity to see films that no longer circulated in popular movie houses, and through Langlois, Truffaut and the entire Cashiers crowd gained their excessive love and knowledge of the history of their craft. Truffaut was so upset over Henri Langlois’ firing that he formed the Cinema Defense Foundation, an organization determined to give control of the Cinematheque back to its founder. The director supposedly made phone calls for donations in between takes on the set of Stolen Kisses.

For all of it though the film is mostly apolitical. If one does not research the topic it wouldn’t make a lick of difference when watching the film. Sure Truffaut opens the film with a shot unrelated to the story, the sad image of the French Cinematheque closed to the public (and he also dedicates the film to Langlois), but he does not address any riots, in fact completely ignores the plight of the students, a cause he championed in his private life. The reason for this is simple: he was not a political filmmaker, though it makes the words of Jean-Luc Godard at the 1968 Cannes Festival both ironic and searing, accusing himself and all filmmakers presenting that year that they were behind the times since no film detailed contemporary France, the struggle between the students and the extreme right-wing government. Is this a fault of Truffaut’s or merely something that proves him as a true auteur? I’m inclined towards the latter since I myself detest politics in films. Truffaut was more interested in the arts and humanity, in love and romance and friendship. Life should not stop because of political upheaval, instead this upheaval is a part of our lives, and we should live and rally against the opposition.

In this regard, Stolen Kisses as a movie is not one of Truffaut’s best pictures. There’s nothing wrong with it per se, but it is too improvisational; that is there exists a free-wielding structure that can be great in another movie but here it left me... not bored but ambivalent towards the screen. I hope that makes sense. Watching it in action the film moves as briskly as anything Truffaut made and it’s filled with beautiful, touching moments, but it lacked the earnestness of The 400 Blows, the film that gave us Antoine Doinel. Maybe I shouldn’t be comparing the two films. They are quite different.

Here Antoine is becoming a man. He (like Truffaut did) receives a dishonorable discharge after volunteering for the service. The man dismissing him wonders why he volunteered; speculates it was to impress a woman, but we soon learn the truth: Antoine read a book about the service and his experiences in the army merely did not match it. This is the problem with Antoine as he gets older. I may be biased since personally I’m not prone to risky, hasty decisions, but the older he gets the less “cute” his misadventures seem. He doesn’t seem to understand that the years will go by whether or not his romantic fantasies are indulged, and in trying to live as he thinks he should he is forgetting to live. But that is not right—this is my own attitude talking. Antoine lives an exciting, experience-laden life. His many professions allow him to sample a whole universe set up by tradition and necessity. He is constantly working, obviously, making enough money to keep an apartment (and certainly doing better than an old school friend he meets on the streets who rummages through trash—perhaps a dig at the government for failing its youth).

Jean-Pierre Léaud reprises the famous role. This man was a conduit of the New Wave. I get the feeling that we, the audience, have never known the true Léaud. Truffaut used him to express his own flighty moods and Godard used him as an anarchic symbol, another extension of someone else, and through it all Léaud let himself be shaped. He is a true chameleon, a divisive actor whose improvisation style never seems to be wrong. He always fits his films, even when he stands out. I can admit though to finding him pretentious sometimes, though seldom with Truffaut. Throughout the Doinel films he doesn’t shape an arch for the character. He simply performs the role as Truffaut wrote it, experiencing life as Antoine has in Truffaut’s script. This relaxed attitude towards his craft (and least that’s how it appears to me) is fascinating, and proves that movie acting is about having spirit and knowing lines, and very little complexity.

Stolen Kisses is Léaud and Truffaut’s lighthearted take on the growing adventures of Antoine Doinel. He is no longer the lost kid we first knew. He is a young man, making his way in the world and constantly lost in it through a free-wielding spirit in search of love. I along with millions of people since 1959 have adopted Antoine as a friend, a son, a spiritual partner, and care about him deeply. I guess ultimately I found Stolen Kisses somewhat melancholic; that Antoine cannot keep a job and moves with the wind does not speak well for his future endeavors.

Stolen Kisses (1968)

(a.k.a. Baisers volés)

Director: Francois Truffaut

Writers: Francois Truffaut, Claude de Givray

Stars: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Claude Jade and Delphine Seyring

France

In French

Runtime: 90 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062695/