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DAWN OF THE DEAD
(Anchor Bay)
1978. 127 mins, 139 mins, and 118 mins. 1.85:1 Aspect Ratio enhanced for 16X9 monitor screens.
4 Discs. Commentary tracks featuring George & Chris Romero, Tom Savini, Richard Rubinstein, David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott Reiniger and Gaylen Ross, and moderator Perry Martin. Two Documentaries: DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD and THE DEAD WILL WALK. Home movies. Mall tour. Trailers and commercials. Still collection. Text profile of Dario Argento.
Written and directed by George A. Romero. Produced by Richard P. Rubinstein.
Director of Photography, Michael Gornick. Music by The Golbins with Dario Argento.
Starring David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott Reiniger, Gaylen Ross.

Is there anything missing in this monumental special edition? Well, yes, one thing: where’s Dario on the commentary track of his cut. The guy can stagger by with his English. I’d like to have heard him weigh in at length on his involvement with Romero on this and TWO EVIL EYES, his vision in assembling the material for his foreign release, and DAWN’s influence on his work. (He does a tiny bit of this in the new documentary.) But unfortunately, Dario has made it clear in recent years that he doesn’t like doing commentaries, so this sole missing element was probably something Anchor Bay just couldn’t obtain.

I hope you can tell that I spent some time trying to think of what could be missing, and Dario’s commentary is the feeblest response I could come up with. Outside of that, there’s nothing else missing, and this is the greatest presentation ever afforded an example of the horror genre. I’m moved almost to tears by what this means for a genre I’ve been involved with on and off over the years, one for which I find myself almost reverently remembered, and yet simultaneously one which periodically gets me shoved up against a wall and called upon to justify my love of it. Horror has always been regarded by too damn many people as a shunned stepchild of cinema, and finally that’s just because it’s endemically scary and upsetting, not just ‘when called for’ as in drama, etc. I’ve always been tolerant of those who admit horror is not their cup of tea, but I have no tolerance for those who try to invalidate the entire genre and claim to have a critical viewpoint when in reality they’re just not up to it. I’m not the biggest fan of musicals myself, but I can understand the aesthetics of the genre, and I’ve grown to really love a few of them. (Waiting patiently for James Whale’s SHOWBOAT and Powell/Pressburger’s TALES OF HOFFMANN, by far my two faves [Ludmila Tcherina, who I knew, was happy to learn that her sequence in HOFFMANN had been a formative influence on Romero – and the new DAWN documentary shows footage from HOFFMANN, though none from Tcherina’s sequence]

Horror, or course, transcends genre. THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI was sold here as a horror film, because U.S. distributors can make more money pigeon-holing films for the public, but abroad it was a political allegory. DEAD OF NIGHT was ultimately something more akin to a philosophical treatise than a horror anthology. And DAWN OF THE DEAD was also a war film. I never asked Sam Fuller if he’d seen it, but I bet he’d have loved it. In DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD, Michael Gornick worries that DAWN might be straying too far from the pure horror realm. Well, it not only straddled genres deftly, but it was a metaphor as well, for the zombifying pacification of the mall era. I’m the last in a long, long line to point that out, and to maintain that Romero’s thoughtful metaphor helped make the film one of the most prescient and undated of the 70s.

Comparing Romero’s two cuts of the film with Argento’s version is a special treat, and a unique experiment (like the one described above, in the EYES WITHOUT A FACE review, only far more elaborate) – allowing two gifted but dramatically dissimilar genre directors to have their way with the exact same material. The difference between them is that of a basically intellectual approach (Romero’s) and a more impatient, visceral one (Argento’s), which very much describes the two filmmakers. I’d have liked Argento’s more if I’d warmed to Goblin’s score, but it’s not among the group’s best work, and furthermore the director seems to have laid the cues in lazily, without sufficient aesthetic forethought. There’s one cut that particularly jarred and amused me – Reiniger’s and Foree’s first venture down into the mall from the foursome’s isolated aerie. The music here sounds like the ‘electronic tonalities’ from FORBIDDEN PLANET. I was waiting for a zombie Robbie the Robot to come walking around a corner. Come to think of it, Robbie’s walk was amazingly zombie-like…

THE DEAD WILL WALK, Perry Martin‘s brand new, 75 minute documentary covering the creation of the film and its long-term effects, is a major success. I can’t imagine a viewer being happier: you’re always seeing what you need to see. Interviews lead you to clips, and to on-set footage (some of it 16mm, some even more degraded [super-8?]). It’s a seamless construct. The interviews are beautifully lit and back-dropped. George is backed with gold, which fades to black on the right, like the forboding dark edge of time. Savini and Gaylen Ross are quite funny. Savini describes how he enjoyed picking a person in each theater audience and watching the evolution of their heart attack. Ross describes a European acting coach blithely accepting the zombie scenario while giving her pupil advice. A pride of zombie extras recall their experiences, and how the special aura of the film has glorified their lives.

This film is its own double-bill. Show one of the Romero cuts, then put on Argento’s. One thing you’ll notice in comparing them is what Argento did to my zombie walk-on. In DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD, you see Romero cutting the scene wherein the bikers have their way with the zombies. I played one of the undead, and had a pie slapped into my already Savini-decorated face. George could have just ran it into the next cut, but he didn’t; he gave me an extra second of time, so that the pie slipped off and I stared, bewildered, into the camera. It was generous of him. But Argento has trimmed me of my twenty-four frames of humanity. In Dario’s world, I’m just a nonentity.

THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE
(Fox Entertainment)
1959. 74 mins. B&W & CinemaScope (2.35:1 Aspect Ratio). Not Rated.
Directed by Roy Del Ruth. Screenplay by Orville H. Hampton. Makeup Effects partially created by Dick Smith.
With: Beverly Garland, George Macready, Lon Chaney Jr., Richard Crane, Freida Inescort, Bruce Bennett.

I’m sure everyone’s caught the error by now: the box cover plot summary mistakenly identifies Lon Chaney Jr. as Beverly Garland’s husband, when in fact he’s a disgruntled, one-handed bayou scum. Chaney’s first sequence, picking Ms. Garland up at the train station and driving her to a ‘Mandalay-in-the-swamp’ is, remarkably, among his best acted scenes ever. He nails a Louisiana accent and makes us believe in his character. Later all that slips away, unfortunately.
The majestic CinemaScope logo music, one of the most passionate fanfares ever written for a film company, sets up an utterly ludicrous Eisensteinian montage cut to the film’s considerably less than worthy title. The jolt has the effect of buckling us in for a roller coaster ride of a film, but the direction, though serviceable and respectful, is never dynamic enough to carry the narrative, despite the art department’s efforts to enliven the proceedings with odd props like an amphibian-mobile, Chaney’s hook-hand, and some real gators in surprising proximity to the performers. Roy Del Ruth, a former gag writer for Mack Sennett, was 64 when he helmed the film, not a particularly debilitating age. Then again, he died two years later, so who knows? THE PHANTOM OF THE RUE MORGUE, which he made five years earlier in 3D, was a more energized work, as I recall. (Creepily, his last film was entitled WHY MUST I DIE.)
I love Beverly Garland, but she was not sent in the right direction directorially, and the script, while moderately intelligent, takes some decidedly goofy leaps in inner logic in relation to her character. When I interviewed Ms. Garland ten years ago, she recalled the film with amusement, and her genre career with warmth: “The films that I did were not sex-oriented; they weren’t the girl-with-the-great-body-who-can’t-talk, you know? That’s one reason they’ve held up as well as they have. THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE was the hardest, only because I’m making love to this poor man who looks like an alligator, and telling him I love him and it doesn’t make any difference and I’ll always be there. That’s not easy to do with somebody wearing an alligator face. Yet, because we did it like we were doing BEN-HUR, it came out well. I worked on those little horror films with as much passion as I did on DOA or THE JOKER IS WILD. They’re very honest, and I think that’s what makes them so big today in the cult market, in addition to people’s fascination with nostalgia.”
Do you really need a plot summary? Actually the story is not without its cleverness. Ms. Garland has forgotten part of her past and, after evoking it under hypnosis, the doctors who listen to her upsetting tale decide to let sleeping alligators lie, choosing not to reveal such a dreadful past to the happy woman.
The title creature is Universal-like in that it evokes more pity than fear, and in doing so actually robs the film of some of its thriller potential. Richard Crane looks uncomfortable in his reptilian silly-putty facial appliances, but suave and striking in his Bogart-via-Tod Browning noir overcoat. The makeup features very early work by Dick Smith. Was that him wrestling an alligator?
The print and mastering are lovely. The CinemaScope frame is very wide – unnecessarily so for the story, but it does show off the crisp, sincere cinematography. With a long-awaited but obscure title like this upon us, can THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK be far behind? Every little pleasure, guilty or otherwise, seems to be coming to those of us who wait.

In its unnecessary use of widescreen, and its attempt to take itself seriously, I keep thinking of THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN OF THE HIMALAYAS (Anchor Bay), with Peter Cushing and Forrest Tucker. I guess I’m suggesting that this might be your double-bill.

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