1971@50: WILLARD

Young Willard Stiles still lives with his mum and gets daily bullied by his oaf of a boss. When his mother throws a birthday party for him she invites her own friends. He walks out and goes to frown at his life in the back of the crumbling mansion where they live. Seeing a rat he flinches but then feeds it some of his birthday cake and then as the rest of its pack arrives they get the rest of the slice. His mother isn't so open minded and wants him to kill them. Well, they're just rats so he organises a trap with food, a plank and water. It works until the water level stresses them and he puts the plank back so they can escape. It's possible they are the closest thing to friends he has ever had and he sets up a home for them in the cellar, training them to follow basic commands. Not so powerless and mild mannered now.

Daniel Mann, directorial all rounder, approached this horror scenario by underplaying its threat. Ernest Borgnine's sadistic boss is more terrifying than the rats and when his party is invaded by a pack of them at Willard's command we feel its just desserts. It's when Willard's personal impotence breaks against the force of his rage and he leads the rats to ever darker territory that we begin to feel uneasy and wonder how much he has come to love the animals and how much he just likes the power. The horror here doesn't have paws and tails.

And it wouldn't work without Bruce Davison's realisation of the title role. His Willard isn't just some sap who lets people walk all over him. He understands that he lets this happen and is most likely the way of a  world he will never be able to change. Even the possibilities fowarded by Sondra Locke's Joan seem unreal to him as he treats her sympathy more casually than he might if he were more of a Travis Bickle. Willard's conversations with Joan have a refreshing pleasantness but it's one that allows us to see the potential that his life has done its best to crush. So, while Travis' clunking misjudgements with Betsy make us cringe and he starts to look more and more like what we'd now call an incel, Willard really has only missed the opportunity. He really is a believable nice guy and knows the gravity of his deeds as much as the joys he might find with Joan.

The mansion sits in the ugliness of a part of the city that could be anywhere in the world. It's all forgotten glory and overgrowth, ruled by Elsa Lanchester's monster of need and bitterness. It is familiar rather than homely, a kind of Baby Jane meets the Addams Family on Sunset Boulevard. Perhaps a two bedroom flat might have provided more narrative stress but the old house does such a good job at being an escape worse than the world escaped from. Just as we groan for a little pushback from Willard we also might shiver from the mutual loathing between him and his mother.

At the end of a decade that destabilied confidence in a system and exposing it for the fantasy it always had been Willard's horror is that of the compliant Vietnam draftee, the whipping boy, the cipher. We might freeze at the torment of a Norman Bates but Willard knowingly won't give us the satisfaction. It's not the suspense of a psychological timebomb we fear in him but the patience of life's undeclared saints who, given the chance, might well lead armies of rats.