(Ro)Dental Problems

Films: Willard (1971); Ben
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

I used to have pet rats. When I say that, I learn that there are two basic types of people. There are a few people who know the joys of pet rats, but by far the most common response is a slight recoil and a wrinkling of the nose. I’ll happily tout just how good rats are as pets. They’re smart, affectionate, and trainable. In fact, the only real drawback to them is that they don’t live very long. We had a rat who lived for three years, and that’s sort of the equivalent of a human living to 110. I bring this up because Willard is a rat movie.

There are a few kinds of creature movies when we’re talking about real-world creatures. Jaws is the classic version of a big creature going on a rampage, and most other films of the same vein are pale shadows (Orca and Grizzly come to mind). There are also the classic giant vermin films that have good examples (Them, for instance) and plenty of terrible ones (The Deadly Mantis, The Killer Shrews, Night of the Lepus, and The Giant Leeches to name a few). And then there are swarm movies. Phase IV, Squirm, Frogs, Piranha, Kingdom of the Spiders and more fit into this category. That’s the category for Willard, with the swarm being rats.

Willard Stiles (Bruce Davison) is an introvert and something of a loser. Is job is at a plant that was started by his father but taken over by a man named Martin (Ernest Borgnine), who treats Willard terribly in the hopes of getting him to quit. Willard lives with his shrewish mother (Elsa Lanchester) in a dilapidated house that she constantly demands he fix. One of those fixes is getting rid of a nest of rats. Willard attempts to drown them but takes pity on them instead and keeps them in a shed. Slowly, he learns to like the rats, and has a favorite named Socrates. He also has a rat named Ben, who seems to have more a dark influence over him and his thoughts.

With the rats as the main positive in his life, the rest of Willard’s world spirals out of control. His mother dies, leaving him not money but a pile of debt. The house is going to be foreclosed on, and his boss desperately wants to buy it to knock it down and put up an apartment building. Willard, though, wants something like revenge. He’d also like a life with Joan (Sondra Locke), a temporary worker at his office.

What separates Willard from the rest of the swarm movie pack is that in this case there is a mind controlling the swarm. Willard trains his rats to obey simple verbal commands, and because he treats them well, they do as he asks. This includes helping him steal money to pay the back taxes on his house and helping him get revenge on the people who have wronged him. Willard only wants a normal life, but it appears that there is nothing but obstacles in front of him, preventing him from having it.

Willard is not the movie I thought it was going to be. Based on what I had heard about it, I expected something along the lines of Sugar Hill but with rats. Willard hunts down the people who have treated him poorly and sics his rats on them, allowing them to gnaw on his enemies and getting them a free meal out of it in the process. True, this does happen a time or two, but the movie is smarter than this. Willard isn’t so depraved an individual that he sees his actions as being entirely justified and justifiable. As the ending comes close, we see that Willard has decided that may rodental revenge isn’t always the best choice.

Bruce Davison is very good in this. Willard works because Davison is pitiable, and we need for Willard to be someone for whom we feel sorry. Even when he takes things too far, we need to be in his corner and rooting for him. He’s the one who has been put upon, and the is where our loyalties need to lie, and for the most part, they do. Ernest Borgnine is delightfully campy and chews all of the scenery, and it’s glorious to watch.

I’m not sure I’m keen on the ending of Willard, but overall, it’s a fine movie, and kind of surprising.

Willard was successful enough that it spawned an immediate sequel, Ben. This is the story of Willard’s surviving rat Ben looking for a new person to live with and looking to lead the pack to prosperity, or at least what counts as prosperity for a rat. We start the film with the last five minutes or so of the previous film. That was probably a good idea in 1972 since the audience likely needed that refresher, but when you watch the movies back-to-back, it’s a very odd recap.

Ben the rat escapes and makes his way to the house of the Garrison family. It’s here that he encounters young Danny Garrison (Lee Montgomery). Danny has heart problems (he’s clearly had heart surgery at one point, and shows his scar) and is something of a weird, introverted kid because of it. He likes to play with puppets and make them sing, and seems to be unable to do so without laughing at his own wit. He is also desperately lonely, which makes him a perfect target for Ben the rat. Danny lives with his mom (Rosemary Murphy) and his older sister Eve (Meredith Baxter).

What happens is that Ben shows up to Danny’s “workshop” where he keeps all of the things he likes to build and play with. Ben becomes his new friend despite the fact that there is essentially a city-wide rat hunt for the swarm of rats that is known to have attacked several people and that apparently lives in or around the old Stiles place. Not wanting his friend to be hurt, Danny keeps Ben safe and even lies to the police about the location of the rat swarm’s nest and about having seen any rats in the area. Despite his best intentions, the rats are spotted several times and eventually the police call in extermination experts and guys with flamethrowers(!) to deal with the menace.

In truth, the most notable thing about Ben is probably that the title song, which can only be described as a young man telling a rat that he loves him. The song was originally performed by Michael Jackson, so it’s got that working for it, too.

I’ll be blunt on this one: Ben isn’t nearly as good a movie as Willard is. There’s far less plot for one thing, in large part because a great deal of the film is about the police going into the sewers and attacking the rats with flamethrowers. Believe me, it’s not nearly as fun and exciting as it sounds like it’s going to be. The bigger problem with Ben is that a great deal of the plot simply doesn’t work. We have to make a lot of intuitive leaps to get from where we start to where we end up (which in this case happens to be a city sewer, covered in filth).

Ben isn’t bad. It just isn’t that great, either.

Why to watch Willard: A swarm movie with a difference.
Why not to watch: It’s not the ending you want.

Why to watch Ben: More ratty goodness.
Why not to watch: It makes less sense than Willard and it’s sappier, too.

She Drinks a Whiskey Drink, She Drinks a Vodka Drink

Film: I’ll Cry Tomorrow
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

It took Susan Hayward five tries to win an Oscar. Four of those five, including her eventual win, were portrayals of women had fallen in some significant and terrible way. That terrible failing might be alcohol (Smash-Up), booze and a bad marriage (My Foolish Heart), or crime (I Want to Live!). With I’ll Cry Tomorrow, it was a return to alcohol, and many of the same places she went in Smash-Up. It’s also a return to what she did in With a Song in My Heart, in that she’s playing a real person and a real life.

I’ll Cry Tomorrow is the story of Lillian Roth (Hayward), an actress and performer in the early days of the movies. Roth was thrust on stage by her mother (Jo Van Fleet) and forced into a life of performance. It’s never really clear that this was something that Lillian wanted for herself. In fact, when she, out in Hollywood, reconnects with David Tredman (Ray Danton), a childhood friend, she’s absolutely ready to ditch the life completely. David, an entertainment lawyer, gets some solid gigs for Lillian as the two prepare to get married. But David suffered from some mysterious (and never defined) malady, and he dies suddenly while Lillian is on stage.

Call, Girl

Films: BUtterfield 8
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

Every now and then, an actor has a string of Oscar nominations. It doesn’t always result in a win, but for Elizabeth Taylor, four was a charm. Strong performances from 1957-1959 put her close to the podium but not atop it. She finally got there in 1960 with BUtterfield 8 for a role that she hated and that she was convinced got her the Oscar in a sympathy vote thanks to a nar-fatal bout of pneumonia. By the way, the way I’ve typed the title is not a typo. The title refers to an old-school telephone exchange, and that’s how they were written.

In this case, the phone number in question is an answering service used by Gloria Wandrous (Elizabeth Taylor). Gloria is the dark version of the following year’s Holly Golightly. She’s a prostitute in all respects except that she refuses to take money for spending time with a man. In the opening sequence, she wakes up alone in a man’s apartment and explores it. She discovers her torn dress from the night before and appropriates a mink coat to wear over her slip. She also finds an envelope of money for her, a fact that offends her and makes her decision to take the mink that much more justified in her mind.

Skin Deep

Films: The Rose Tattoo
Format: Movies! Channel on rockin’ flatscreen.

Most of The Rose Tattoo takes place inside the house of the main character, a good indication that this was based on a stage production, which it was. Tennessee Williams apparently wrote this with his friend Anna Magnani in mind, but she didn’t feel she had a good enough command of English to play the role on stage. Four years after the show debuted, Magnani did take the role in the Hollywood adaptation, one for which she won an Oscar. It’s a pretty straightforward play, based almost entirely around a single character.

I’ve seen plenty of Tennessee Williams adaptations--A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof--but this one was new to me. It’s also substantially different from some of Williams’s other plays, particularly when it comes to the ending. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing; it’s just a thing worth mentioning. Like many of his plays, though, The Rose Tattoo focuses on a woman in the south who is repressed in some significant way and damaged by the events of her past.

Calm Down

Film: The Last Angry Man
Format: TCM Watch on laptop.

I know that in general I’m writing for a movie geek crowd. It’s sad in that respect that Paul Muni is so little known and little remembered. This is a guy who was nominated for five Best Actor Oscars. Five, with one win. For reference the fact that Muni is so little remembered now would be like other five-time nominees being forgotten. Guys like Gary Cooper, Daniel Day-Lewis, Robert De Niro, Tom Hanks, Al Pacino, and James Stewart. So why don’t we remember him?

The Last Angry Man was Muni’s fifth and final official Oscar nomination (he was an unofficial write-in in 1935) as well as his final film appearance. A great deal of Muni’s career was, more or less, turning character parts into leading roles, and his work here is no different. Dr. Sam Abelman (Muni) is a Russian immigrant and a doctor who lives in a downscale Brooklyn neighborhood. He treats patients, most of whom can’t pay and many of whom are ungrateful, out of his home. As the film opens, a group of young thugs drops off an unconscious woman (played by no less a luminary than Cicely Tyson) on his doorstep and drive away.

What's with the Dog?

Film: Come Back, Little Sheba
Format: Internet video on laptop.

Strap in folks, because this one is going to hurt. For whatever reason, the DVD I got from NetFlix yesterday wouldn’t play in my laptop, so I was stuck with internet videos if I wanted to get something watched. And for whatever reason, I selected Come Back, Little Sheba. Honestly, I’m sure my rationale was that I’m the furthest behind on Best Actress nominees, mostly because they are underrepresented on the 1001 Movies list. I’ve got it as a minor goal to get to 50% done by the end of the year, so I’ve been hitting them pretty hard of late, and the Best Actress nomination (and, in fact, winner) is the only reason that film is on my radar.

Continuing my current inadvertent theme, this is another film that was originally based on a stage play, and it has all of the earmarks of that despite having a couple of scenes away from the main set. It’s also a film that is heavy on drama and meaning without being of anything earth-shatteringly important. No, this is a domestic drama by definition, and it doesn’t really go that far outside the home.