AMARCORD @ 50

The people of a small coastal town in Italy in the '30s rejoice at the puffballs in the air, the first sign of spring and as evening draws near they gather in the square to burn the effigy of the Witch of Winter in a bonfire. As this progresses we get to know the local characters including the near constant focus, the boy Titta and his family. The fuel, hay and the broken chairs and tables of the whole town go up in flames and the people rejoice but what on the surface appears to be a vast Breughelian rustic celebration is riddled with tiny acts of cruelty and moments of darker mien (which is also very Breughel but you know what I mean). Apply that to any other aspect to small town life you can think of and you have this film. Well, no, not that easy.

Fellini's return to his roots mixes nostalgia with some thorns of real history. The title is a contraction of the Italian for "I remember" as might be spoken by Fellini himself or anyone from his native Rimini. It's like someone from where I grew up saying "I 'member". The point to create as much distance as intimacy with the life of the townsfolk, to remind us, also, that recollection can trouble as well as ease. For instance, Titta and his gang of boys play pranks and gad about but they are doing this through a weave of the spectre of '30s Italy, fascism. It's there in the big ceremonial event but is still there when the bands stop playing and the banners are rolled back up, holding onto surfaces like the unscrubbable grime of an old spittoon.

But anyone could show that. Fellini pushes our heads into it as young Ciccio is inspired by the Disney-like promise of fulfilment of the fascist spectacle that he is plunged into a fantasy of marrying the girl who spurns him by day. They are joined between rows of youth, boys on one side wielding phallic submachineguns and girls on the other holding up vaginal hoops. Ken Russell would have made this more literal. Fellini knows he doesn't have to. It's not even just that he's a subtler film maker but one who lived through fascism and its psycho symbolism (and the later lethal weirdness of nazism that it inspired). Ciccio's finding a way through the bizarre pressure of the militarism and turning it into a self-pleasing moment to return to later, alone in the dark. 

The pre-fascist mobsters of the Church don't get off any lighter. Titta is trying to confess his masturbation as the priest keeps interrupting to berate one of his orderlies about flower arrangements. By the time Titta gets to his admission he has had time to whittle it down to something mild that the priest won't be too troubled by. This is followed by his loping bullish schoolfriend who, as the son of the mayor, can admit to any atrocity and be absolved without penance. The twin fists of church and state combine in the classroom where teachers stridently fail to connect with their students and all but squeeze prankish rebellion from them. Fellini's casting of the schoolboys here is hilarious. They are all too old to be in that class with their moustachioed Eurostyling but this isn't Grease casting; Fellini wanted them to have the awkwardness of teenage boys almost to pantomime lengths to show the apelike wrongness felt by the thirteen year old. This is never commented on, the audience has to do its own reconciliation between what they see and what they are meant to see.

And this is before we get to the women of the town from the constantly frowning and feebly ancient countess to the beauty who remains alone as no suitor would consider himself a match. I was worried that the scene between Titta and the massive-breasted tobacconist might not travel well through time but it is far more nuanced and sobering than I recalled (which tells you more about what I was like when I first saw it). Volpina, the nymphomaniac girl comes across as eerie rather than bawdy. The cart of new sex workers heading to the brothel are taunted throughout the town by the males who will be their customers or at least dream of such. And there is the Italian Mama, Titta's mother, who suffers the frenetic energy of her children and the clownish bluster of her husband. While her violent retorts and remonstrances show as a constant strain from having to maintain control of the near chaos of her family, she does take them seriously and becomes one of the most poignantly drawn characters among this vast cast.

I used to say as a kind of swagger point that I preferred my Fellini '70s. What I meant by that was Roma and Amarcord and the point was more a mask to cover my lack of experience with the more famous and better loved earlier films. Even now, though, having seen and admired those like the decadance of La Dolce Vita or the proto-Amarcord of I Vitelloni or the panging pathos of La Strada, I feel I've finally earned the preference. I do love Roma and Amarcord better, after all. This is not just a case of first seen first loved but something I find irrestistable about them.

I've long had a strange relationship with nostalgia, seeing it as a kind of art directed pastiche of memory and memory as more of a frantic foraging of sensual messages with only the vaguest of forms. The endless timeline of Roma is held in place by some of Fellini's strongest visual flare and Amarcord adds more depth to the notion of an artist giving an account of themself. It's strange to think that my memories of seeing this film as a late nighter in Brisbane at the start of the '80s arise with such pleasure and then seeing it anew and depths that didn't make it across the decades as a memory.

There is too much to say about this episodic epic and it could be said without serious spoilers but I'll leave it here in hope that something I've written o'erhead will inspire a reader to find a copy and watch it for themselves. I watched Criterion's stunner of a Blu-Ray which rendered the passing ocean liner more of a model than I recalled it but brought the flaring of the peacock's tail late in the film into such sudden beauty that I gasped to see it. Seeing it again only resolved me to watch it regularly, especially to introduce it to others. By the time he got to Amarcord, Fellini had amassed a wealth of craft that allowed him to finally approach his own nostalgia with a credible wisdom as well as archness, with grief and deep comedy, with everything, in fact, that the overriding melancholy of his similarly autobiographical 8 1/2 could not prevent from coming through. That's important, the stifling cynicism of the earlier confession is barely on screen here at a time when the maestro had perspective to present the warmth of the world of his adolescence with pain that can be indistinguishable from fondness. That takes growing.

Review: WOMEN TALKING

A closed religious community that calls itself the Colony is disrupted when a man is caught fleeing the scene of a rape. The rapes are in themselves not unusual but part of a culture of the rigid patriarchy of the micro society. The women (and sometimes girls) are subject to frequent sexual attacks under the rustic roofying of cow tranquiliser. The accused gives up the names of everyone else he knows is culpable. The men buggy it into town to go the bail, leaving the children to play and the women to talk. The women are expected to agree to forgive their attackers or be expelled from the Colony and so the Kingdom of Heaven. The last part sounds like a great deal to me but these women are generations in, unquestioning of their faith, and they do have binds of parenthood and family to consider. They assemble in the barn and talk. Stay and do nothing? Stay and fight? Leave?

The discussion begins shakily. Tensions reveal themselves, disputes rise and the question of what happens if they abandon the only society they've known. We've seen the whole community at prayer, a kind of Millet set piece with heads bowed at pews in a silence that could be used as emulsifier. A young female voice narrates sparely, addressing the child being carried by one of the women in the assembly. While none of the attacks are depicted on screen there are many cutaways to the immediate consequences. The dialogue moves cautiously at first, like a freed hostage taking their first unbelieving steps out of their confinement. There is fresh trauma and whatever it becomes when stretched into a lifetime with only a sawdust and porridge flavour of religion to provide solace. There's a lot of work to do and it's going to take some doing to get some of these minds changed.

Sarah Polley's tenth directorial film is a work of sustained restraint, keeping a ceiling of clear wrap over emotions that come from trauma, loosening here when one of the senior figures tells yet another homespun parable about her horses, tightening strongly when the culture of violence needs to be given voice. This doesn't mean it ends up bland but rather the shifts of intensity offer relief from confronting statements that will allow relatively easy passage through the hundred minutes of screen time. This film, which really does what its title says it will, does not drag for a moment of the talky bulk of it. It's when this turns to action we just want it to start hurrying up.

Polley uses a painterly pallet for the long rustic day, desaturating the warmth to leave an earth brown wash which stresses the weight of the oppression and evokes a kind of rural gothic. It also suggests nostalgia of a type that allows the kind of protected society to sustain, a status quo of pioneer privation and harsh justice based on a jealously guarded filtration of a bronze age text. It's a text that the women are prevented from learning through enforced illiteracy. This look and feel can be by turns oppressive and warm and an astute use of scoring (by film composer star Hildur Gudnadottir) allows for a tonal balance. Balance is what holds up the blocking as the camera and performers' interplay gives a sense of action to the constant dialogue. While the explosively emotive Salome is typically in motion, her contrarian counterpart Mariche sits forward turning her head rather than her body to respond. the teenagers who are often at the edges of the ensemble, provide a witness and choric function. That's a lot of verbiage to say that this talky movie is very physical. It's worth recalling that Polley began as an actor, aware of the value of motion and stillness but is also an accomplished director who knows how to do the same with a camera.

It can take a little longer than you might expect for the individual viewpoints to be established in the assembly and I did get restless at the similarity of positions and how easy it was to lose track of some threads, trying to follow each. Eventually, relaxing into the general movement is rewarded with an appreciable forward motion as differences are stripped to barer conflict.

There are some heavyweight performances supporting this. Claire Foy's Salome has a fire lit by ghastly experience. Jessie Buckley's Mariche is more survivor, keeping her poise self-protective and her retorts resistant. Frances McDormand is only on screen briefly (revealed in the opening scene) but if your thoughts don't return to her throughout you've blinked too long. Rooney Mara's life-affirming optimism is delivered in one of the most sedative full face smiles imaginable but she, like all the others, passes through breaking points in the course of the talk. Ben Wishaw, one of my favourite U.K. character actors, is August, the sole adult male given lines who serves as the women's notary. He is the outside world, having returned from his family's banishment to teach the Colony's boys. The fragility that the beating of the experience has left him with renders him intelligent but awkward and timid. Virtually imploding at every turn the notion that he will stay regardless of how the women vote hangs over the story.

So, it's 2023 do we really need a story that tells us that men are bad and women are victims? Well, this year brought a major legacy of the administrative disaster of the Trump years to action, the overturning of Roe vs Wade which enshrined the right to abortion across the USA. Trigger laws in thirteen states came into immediate effect variously constraining access to abortion or banning it outright. It really is 2023 and somethings really are racing backwards. Also, the source novel (same title) is based on events that took place in Bolivia in 2009. Sarah Polley is Canadian and a good swag of the cast are British, Irish and from outside the lands of the accents they speak but there is no commitment to location. We might well be hearing Anglicised dialogue from the Spanish. the Southern Cross becomes a talking point and your eyes would need to be good to see it from western USA. But the point is that it doesn't have to be anywhere specific as its concerns are as old as humanity wherever it has roamed and settled. 

Is it preachy? It has to be. The atrocities discussed might sound extreme (what point to make them more easily digestible?) but the response of the women to effect their own local apocalypse in pursuit of freedom from lives of trauma is genuine, ongoing and legitimate even in this rarefied form. And it does play fair, describing itself as "an act of female imagination" in the opening credit sequence. If it does break into dogma momentarily there is genuine gravity to command that and warmth to mitigate it. I couldn't help but be mindful of the rasping cries by one of Polley's fellow Canucks to repel boarders who dare to attack the status quo (there is even a moment involving an act of live-naming a trans figure ... but no, I'll swear off hearing a second of Jordan Peterson's review of this one, thanks). This is not presented as a lecture, a sermon or even history, it's more accurately a cry for acknowledgement, and it's loud and powerful.

1983 @ 40: WAR GAMES

After a nuclear war drill ends with a whimper the Pentagon decides to go with automating the process to end all that pesky ethical hesitation. Meanwhile, David in Seattle hacks into his high school to change his results and keeps going until he gets into the Pentagon. One of the resident apps on the system is a nuke war simulation. When asked which side he wants, he chooses Soviet. Seems fair.

As this film is old enough for some readers not to have seen it (or heard of it) I won't be putting spoilers in. But I can say without losing sleep that the Pentagon's system can't tell between a game and a real attack. That's pretty much built into the premise.

War Games was a hit, mining the late Cold War fear of nuclear holocaust and pop curiosity about computer systems and hacking. It was also the big movie debuts of its central duo, Ally Sheedy and Matthew Broderick who had Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller in their near futures. The computer technology is vintage with the home setup looking boxy and clunky (acoustic modems and voice synthesisers) but the higher up it gets the more it resembles the old '60s trope of computers as magic boxes with flashing lights. But this is not a documentary about information technology, just its use by that old enemy of humanity: humanity.

John Badham directed, taking over from Martin Brest. Brest had envisaged a dark thriller but was fired in favour of Badham with his teen movie approach. But the big dark cloud of nuke apocalypse was still moving overhead so it couldn't quite play out like a Dean Jones and Jan Michael Vincent Disney pic and get away with it. What we do get is a credible cold war thriller lightened by teen energy. The '80s at the cinema were already turning into the first wave of worldly teens so the tension between David and the heavy from the Pentagon is not the kind that ends in a line about pesky kids. Dr Strangelove, a decades old black satire about the nuclear threat, was still a riot of palpably nervous laughs. 

This means that War Games plays as an efficient thriller with an ethical heart which manages to be neither dismissive of the gravity nor hampered by it. The teens are, if not quite wholesome, beautiful and not beyond tough life lessons. Matthew Broderick pours all the cool sass he would refine for Ferris (a film I hate but whose cultural value I'm forced to admit) which probably served as his audition for it. Ally Sheedy is interestingly both excited by the thrill of the badness but increasingly drawn back to the ethics that applies not just to the early hacking but the war system that reveals itself.

The middle act pursuit by the pair of the brain behind that system might stretch credibility now (where it would be shown to be crushingly difficult) but if you can suspend yourself across it you'll be treated to a fine dialogue about the terrifying possibility that nuclear cataclysm has moved outside of the control of human will. It's fine because it's delivered in a situation of safety and comfort and spoken gently. It's like sitting down to hear bad news.

The world wouldn't know about it for many years but 1983 was the year when annihilation was averted when the Soviet system misidentified a detected early warning blip as an attack. That was averted by a single officer refusing to execute his orders. It wasn't known but the possibility of life on earth being reduced to foraging among ashes due to an error was in the shade of every conversation about the news. John Badham is not given place among the auteurs but his rap sheet is solid. After decades of TV his move to the big screen included the Frank Langella Dracula and Saturday Night Fever to start with. By choosing to nurture the gravitas of his young stars and let it emerge from the vigour of their sense of fun. Doing that kept the film on message without letting it drag and delivered a note of hope to an audience that was in danger of accepting the threat around and above them. It's not the life-suckingly bleak Threads or even the more sanitised The Day After but War Games still works. Could we do one for the climate crisis? That already comes with a teenage star.

BOOGIE NIGHTS @ 25 (Some spoilers)

Young Eddie gets scouted while at his wait job at an L.A. night club. It's 1977 and porn has been having a good run with the general public. Star flesh flick director Jack Horner sees the lithe young Eddie whose reputedly outsize penis would be right at home in one of Jack's movies. Eddie himself is used to this attention and when Jack accosts him in the kitchen of the club Eddie tells him he charges $5 for a look and $10 to watch a self-administered hand job. Back home his mother waits in the dark, exploding when Eddie finally gets in, launching an attack that has enough of a creepy edge to it to feel far worse than the not angry but disappointed lecture. Eddie runs, still a few months shy of legal, into the arms of the happy family in the house that Jack built. Next stop stardom.

But this is not just Eddie's story nor is it just about pornography. Buck tries to develop the audio retail side of his working life but no one at the sound system shop buys him as a black cowboy. Amber comes across as maternal to the younger ones on the set but has lost contact with her real child. Her surrogate daughter Rollergirl can't finish high school because, like most people, she finds it oppressive and, unlike most of her fellow students, already has a couple of decent incomes. Club owner Maurice thinks he has a shot at porn stardom. Reed is a walking case of Dunning Kruger syndrome. People don't even bother to wait until he turns his back before laughing at him. Little Bill's wife won't stop shagging other guys at every party they go to. And at the centre of everything in this mini cosmos is Jack Horner who believes he can raise porn to an art that will be warmed by the embrace of a mainstream that will legitimise his life. In short, everyone in this movie is headed for disaster.

This is not Paul Thomas Anderson's first feature. That was Hard Eight and you had to hunt it down online if you wanted to see it. When Boogie Nights hit it looked like the resurrection of Robert Altman as new Bible sized epics of Americana kept turning up with the Anderson by line. From this one on, Anderson developed into a brand and cinephiles had another auteur to wait on. The good news there is that most of it is worth the wait. 

At the time, the twenty-eight year old was proving adept at presenting a large canvas with a long running time but insisting on its accessibility. Seeing it again, I was struck, having seen most of the more recent PTA titles, how much of a young film maker's film this is. While Anderson can be forgiven for not predicting the stigma-free normalisation of pornography in daily life, his jabs at the stilted acting of porn movies, the crassness of the players in their lives offset ("imported Italian nylon shirts" FFS) or Jack's self-embarrassing monologue about making "real" cinema, come across as cheap shots rather than warmth: too much of the reporting has the young person's judgement about it. That has not survived Boogie Nights in Anderson's career since. The next film Magnolia, while overlong, addresses this and you can almost feel the scouring pad going over the screenplay to present something more mature and accomplished (it ended up being weighed down by self-importance but it really wasn't jusdgey).

But Boogie Nights is far more than a string of easy digs. The various character threads tell solid tales and Anderson's handling of the phase during which we see the consequences of hubris, neglect or decadence weave together in a montage of personal failure that manages to elicit more pity than disapproval, remains entertaining in a way that similar passages by the likes of Oliver Stone never did, and never quite feel like transitory montages. Having established with long takes, deft stitching at the seams through well timed entrances, needle drop music choices or scaled down cataclysms, we are ready to take the many moments of plummeting fortune, self-subversion and falls into perdition as easily as the more conventionally staged scenes. If we chortled at Eddie telling how he settled on the screen name Dirk Diggler we aren't so much as smirking when his jealous dummy spit gets him fired on the spot and cast into the wasteland. Amber and Rollergirl's coked up rhapsody about motherhood is just the next stop on the line of her losing all association with her offscreen son. The stunt in the back of the limo with the old classmate and Rollergirl is, for all its wincing awkwardness, manages to be heart rending. There are too many moments like this to list but you get the idea.

The cast is an astute blend of old guard, contemporary indie darlings and figures of future achievement. Who better than Burt Reynolds with his stapled back face work and history of popular mainstream stud roles to embody the whack movie maker who thinks he's making modern classics. Newcomer to the screen Mark Wahlberg takes us from a believably humble young 'un through to the ravaged vet that a very few years at the top of the porn heap have made him. Celebrated character star to be Phillip Seymour Hoffman makes us ache with his cod out of water pathos in a performance of great courage. Ditto William H. Macy who had weasled his way out of our hearts in the Coens' Fargo only a few years before, gives us someone too long suffering to go on but also too pride-blinded to step away. Julianne Moore continued to prove she could do anything. Don Cheadle's socially offensive anti-stereotype is a coagulating mass of restrained fury. Again, too much to list; a great cast delivering good writing and performance. 

The '90s were the decade of resurrected auteurist flexes. From Scorsese's epic tracking shot scenes in Goodfellas to Tarantino's callbacks to '70s timeline reshuffles and sourced pop songs, to Oliver Stone's mix 'n' match mega student films, it was a time of dazzle. Little wonder that a return to bare bones with 1999's The Blair Witch Project was such a global hit (it wasn't just innovative marketing). Boogie Nights with its restless camera motion and sexy editing was, by decade's end, barely noticeable as a style showcase. It looks a lot fresher now that comparable mainstream movies are presenting comparably calmer surfaces. Then again, after the more bloated Magnolia, and post 911, Anderson's tale of damaged people Punch Drunk Love, came in at a more modest ninety-five minutes and followed a linear path from opening to closing credits.

As a sophomore effort Boogie Nights dazzles because it's meant to dazzle. Everything that he could have done to announce himself the way Orson Welles did with his own feature debut while, also, a young adult, all of it was done, put on the screen in a vehicle designed for notoriety by its subject matter alone. Now, its self-avowed period status, being already a retrospective story, feels even more solid. Yes, it's easy to stretch it a little to apply to Hollywood (where it actually seems better off for the comparison) but that it can be left as a story from the golden era of pornography is testament to its strengths as any kind of film. Anderson was serious about this and ensured that no mistake could be made about his coda scene's celebration of family values. 

It's not a moment of winking irony, it's earnest. It's delivered in the same kind of impressive single take as the one by which we entered as Jack Horner almost gives the audience a guided tour of an evening in with the extended family as the cooking and the prepping and the rehearsals go on. And the last word is given to the object we've only heard about all through as Dirk Diggler perfects his line reading before pulling it out for the mirror and us. Then it's put back. He zips up and makes a few ersatz karate moves and exits. And as we watch the fade to black turn into the end credits and have to endure ELO singing Living Thing is anyone bothering to ask as they did in 1998 if we've just seen a massive prosthetic or if that was the real thing. We're possibly wiser to movie magic now with the development of cinematic television but I wonder how much of that is only by assumption and we ask or studiously omit asking the question lest we should appear crass or, worse, naïve. After two hours and more of Boogie Nights the dilemma of it is fun.

Review: WATCHER

Julia and husband Francis relocate to his ancestral stomping ground of Bucharest. While not born there, Francis' Romanian is fluent. Julia speaks only American. They move into a pretty big flat but Julia notices a forlorn man in a window on the opposite block staring down at her. When she tries to alert Francis to it it's during the day and he can't see anything through the sheer curtain of the watcher's window. He works late every night at his new job. Julia's sense of isolation pushes in and the Watcher keeps on watchin'

This tidy paranoia thriller spends a good deal of its screen time going deep on Julia's isolation. When she's out and about and needs information she can usually find someone with enough English to help but the sense that she knows each occasion is just a band aid and at some point she must either leave or learn. But even at home when they have Francis' colleagues over for dinner she's oafed out of the conversation through the language barrier. The only situation she feels comfortable is when she is alone with her husband, speaking English. Throw in a voyeur who might well be the serial killer on the loose in the city, and a mass of generic misunderstandings and police siding with the local, and her imploding self esteem begins to stifle her.

This is where things start heating up. Well, it's where they should. There is a very deliberate restraint to the pace of this narrative that should allow the depths to be enlightened but once they are established there's not much more than arresting visual style that shows off the corners and vistas of its location. This means that when situations that should be white knuckle suspense come up they tend to pass without significant impact. I suspect if I only saw a clip of the finale I would think it came from a tight and edgy thriller. But there's something happening here beyond the motion postcard aesthetic that is stopping it from becoming that kind of movie.

Karl Glusman is fine as Francis but that only says he can do hot and cold like any life partner role in a paranoia tale. Burn Gorman, fondly remembered from Torchwood, is exemplary as the watcher, the type who can't help being creepy as though chromosomally bound. But we need to get behind Julia and writer /director Chloe Okuno seems to think that having Maika Monroe look coolly beautiful will be enough to snare our empathy. There are moments when Monroe does break out of her anaesthetised performance but, while they do emerge organically, just rise and fall like the suspense itself; there seems so little to her that we struggle to clamp on to her isolation to feel anything. This comes across as deliberate direction rather than poor performance but it sucks the gravity from the film and all we're left with is a competently built timeline with an ok ending. 

Watcher is available to rent from Google Movies and other platforms. This is not the Netflix series called The Watcher nor bears any relation to it.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD @ 55 (Spoilers)

Siblings Barbara and Johnny are driving out to a remote cemetery to refresh the wreath on their father's grave. They're bickering lightly until Johnny remembers how he used to scare her when they were kids and does so. It works well enough for Johnny to rope in the figure walking weirdly towards them. "Coming to get you, Barb-a-rah. Look, there's one of them, now." Satisfied he's got that tiny amount of value out of the hours long drive he heads back to the car. Barbara is attacked by the stranger. Johnny runs to rescue her and gets himself attacked instead, fatally. The weird guy chases her and after a staggered pursuit she manages to get into a nearby farmhouse. There's a ravaged corpse on the landing but it's otherwise unpeopled. She wanders around in shock when a man drives up in a ute and runs into the house. He urgently asks about the petrol pump outside but she is stunned and silent. More of the strange near-lifeless figures approach the house. Some days ...

This is a largely single set film that treats a survival situation as an internal power struggle. If ever the personal was political it was here. Is it better in the basement where they can hold out sturdily or upstairs where they at least can run if they have to? Should the generally calm and rational Ben be in charge or the hothead Harry? These decisions are given to the young couple Judy and Tom but they fall into the problem that plagues every living character of the story: negotiating chaos.

That comes from a brilliant thought in the conception of this film whereby no definite explanation is given for the revived corpses that are roaming the land in murderous hordes. Zombies in horror fiction had been the products of creepy engineering made by magic and religion. They were the slaves of bad guys and a potent allegory of the mass control that seemed to be all the rage in the dictatorships of the '30s and '40s when the likes of White Zombie or Revolt of the Zombies were made. Romero took the magic away and left the phenomenon of revived corpses who were violent, hungry and incapable of communication. Also, he was decidedly non-discriminatory about it. His zombies are from all walks, they're just the dead not the hippy dead or the Vietnam dead or the rich dead. Don't ask why, deal with your own survival first. It was at the end of a decade that matched all that psychedelic positivity with nightmares of racial violence, an ugly and unpopular war, dispiriting high profile assassinations and everything else that was kicking at the shell of the American dream. Who had the time to talk it out when you could get 'em in the head and throw 'em on the fire?

The celebrated colourblind casting of Duane Jones as Ben. He is a young black man with a decisive manner, both rational and assertive. He delivers a snap-out-of-it slap to white bread and wavering Barbara which, while it might seem an archaic solution to her distress now would have felt like an electric charge to the audiences of 1968, even in the Yankee stronghold of Pennsylvania where the film was made and first screened. But Ben's entrance is so confident, urgent and assured that we pretty much snap in behind him. He's well written and plays the authority without a moment's machismo. Later when he shouts that he is in charge if it's to be upstairs to Harry he is pushing back against the incendiary white man's flex, not flexing himself.

Judith O'Dea's Barbara unfairly gets little acclaim but her trek from proper middle class young adult through survivalist action figure, to traumatised living zombie is essential to the workings of the film. It is her apparent fragility that attracts Ben's care, her vulnerability the object of protection. When she thaws out the role transfers to the child Karen on the table in the basement, bitten by zombies and deteriorating steadily. Karen's revival is the other end of this decaying metamorphosis from helpless and gormless to dark and brutal as she murders her mother with a trowel.

In the world outside, seen mostly through the TV, scientific, military and political figures are either guessing or attempting to save themselves. The sole force in the land to be taking action is one remove from a lynch mob. And in the end, as the zombie crowds are breaking down the doors and crawlling through the windows and everyone is getting torn to pieces to feed hunger that knows neither taste nor satisfaction, Ben finally takes refuge in the basement that he so passionately argued against and survives ... until the next morning when one of the extermination squads mistakes him for a zombie and shoots him in the head. The final montage of stills looks like authentic journalistic photography of atrocities as the dead are hauled and piled on to burning mountains of putrescence.

At first it might feel a little older than it is with the stark black and white and public domain orchestral score. Some of the performances can feel like television drama. All that is so but Night of the Living Dead is compellingly cinematic. It's not just the Dutch tilts of a lot of it that emphasise the weirdness of the situation or the expertly choreographed zombie mob scenes, it's the forward bursting situation expanding in the increasingly claustrophobic area of sanctuary, the accelerating hopelessness, the big ideas about what it means to live and how to maintain the value of it when the whole cosmos seems to be on the other team. The surprising gore, also, keeps our attention the way that even the best television dare not try (at least at that time).

Night of the Living Dead is not just a celebrated genre classic, though, it has a legacy that has to do with all the cinema in its wake, the same way that Easy Rider has. As a little movie that could and did, it paved the road to the marvels of the movie brats whose scaled down realistic dramas in the '70s took more chances with less money and, now and then, hit. Night is a source point in independent cinema. Just as punk rock would show how little you needed to make great music at the level of the audience, it offered a sizeable and deep world building that looked like next door but played out like something fantastic. Leonard Maltin nailed it when he described the film as a cinema verite record of a nightmare.

By such means films like Halloween were made. Films made for a pittance which then broke through the blockbuster-dominated late '70s. All of the rising tide of indy cinema in the '80s and onward that became indistinguishable from the arthouse is a throwback to Romero's tiny epic. And then, after a '90s of bloat-budgeted ever larger and ever unscarier bullshit it took a movie made on maxed credit cards to overcome the problem by taking it back to first principles: The Blair Witch Project. The Canadian indy Skinamarink is currently dividing audiences from the serious core of horror fans by not only stripping back but presenting an intentionally disagreeable front of challenging stillness, going perhaps into proto rather than first principles.

Romero himself benefitted from his own legacy when he made Martin in the late '70s, the vampire flick that was also a realistic depiction of adolescent angst. The year after that, his Dawn of the Dead, a massive expansion of Night, stopped the slates of world cinema which now lined up behind the redesigned zombie, still free of magic (with a few exceptions) but still relentlessly shambling toward the living for its satisfaction. This is the zombie pattern right up to Walking Dead and beyond. Even the point-missing running zombies of Dawn's remake couldn't conquer this principle.

Romero then proved that, if anything, he did his best work with the least as almost all his larger budgeted movies were constrained into blandness and convention. The found footage style Diary of the Dead is a superior outing to its multimillion dollar predecessor Land of the Dead. That aside, if Night of the Living Dead had been his only film, Romero would still be celebrated. It changed the game. It's also a really, really good movie.

Viewing notes: I've seen this on tv, VHS, owned two DVDs of it, Criterion's beautiful Blu-Ray presentation and now the one I put on for this article, Criterion's UHD 4K. The finish on this is pretty astounding and it's good to listen to a well mastered original mono track without distortion or wavering levels. 

Review: KNOCK AT THE CABIN

A little girl in a forest is catching grasshoppers and putting them in a jar. A huge man approaches her and manages with his gentle manner to get quite a lot of information from her, including the names of her two dads. He tells her his heart is broken because of what he has to do. He keeps looking over his shoulder at the trees. Eventually three other figures emerge, carrying weird looking weapons. The girl runs into the cabin and tells her fathers. After a valiant effort at defending their holiday home, the quartet gain entry, subdue the adults and bind them to chairs. The large one tells them they will be asked to sacrifice one of their own or the world will come to an end.

If you can't have a red hot guess at how this ends you might need to start ingesting more fiction. However, this is the latest film from M. Night Shyamalan, king of the twists, so...

In the course of the story everybody gets to know each other a little better but each time they ask again if the captives will sacrifice one of their own they get a firm knock back and prove, through news reports that plagues have resulted from the denial. Themes of purity and bigotry (the parents think they've been targeted by psycho homophobes), true love and sacrifice are rolled out stakes rise as power shifts occur. 

Shyamalan has used a trope that can be fascinating and compelling if handled strongly. The best what-if tale I've seen that posits the Biblical apocalypse as literal is the Spanish horror-comedy Day of the Beast. Comparisons in reviews are generally inappropriate so I'll keep this one short. Knock at the Cabin seeks to suggest the situation's enormity through keeping the scale intimate but really only stays small. Day of the Beast is the opposite, tiny players in a big city with none of the certainty of the ending hanging over them. It leaves the risks sky high. It will depend on your belief in the couple in Cabin and your empathy with them and on the credibility you give to their captors' claims. Both stories draw from the book of Revelation (which doesn't have a twist ending) but only Beast renders it compelling.

That is not to say that Cabin has nothing going for it. It's a solid thriller that will not bore you for a second and will get the adrenalin pumping hard. Shyamalan is, after all, a skilled film maker. But if the twist really is only in a single line of dialogue then the joke's on us for expecting a trademark one. The upshot is that the apocalypse hinges on a whimper not a bang. If, like me, you have no religious feeling whatsoever, you might be profoundly unmoved. I can say the same of the similarly (but nowhere near the same) theistic conclusion of Shyamalan's Signs.

I'd recommend this as a good robust time passer which says a few pleasing things about the importance of everyday sacrifice. But if you don't think the term spiritual is vague and floppy bullshit you might get more out of it.