George and Martin: In Memoriam
- Bill Meyer
- Jul 26, 2017
- 8 min read
Quick Note: I am working on a couple of longer pieces for the site, but given the loss of George Romero and Martin Landau on the same day, I wanted to write a quick appreciation...but come back soon for thoughts on Aliens and the Domestication of Ellen Ripley…
I think I was twelve years old the first time I met George Romero, on Halloween night, 1981. We hadn’t yet gotten cable, which at the time offered an unimaginable smorgasbord of thirty-five channels (though the only one that really mattered was MTV, which my mother refused to let us watch “because if you want music, you can listen to the radio for free”) as opposed to the three networks plus PBS that our rabbit-eared hulk of a Magnavox cabinet TV picked up reasonably well. I did manage to talk my mom into letting me install a loop antenna so we could get the newest broadcast channel in town -- a UHF station that showed mostly public domain movies and reruns of such gems as “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” and other obscure delights. The real reason I wanted that antenna, though, was a Saturday night cult movie hour hosted by a morning radio hack named T.J. Trout, who was as recognizable a personality as Albuquerque, New Mexico had to offer in 1981. On that Saturday in October, I was thrilled -- and, to be honest, mostly petrified -- that the feature that week was Night of the Living Dead. All I knew about the movie was that it was famous, and supposedly terrifying, and it had zombies in it, which at twelve was pretty much all I needed.
If you've never seen the film, here's your chance...in glorious HD, no less
Aside from being duly frightened by the film -- mostly the score, actually, and the shot where Barbara finds the half-eaten skeleton in the Farmhouse -- I wondered at the time why the film was such a big deal when most of the time was just characters arguing, and while there were a couple of good scenes of zombie attacks, the movie seemed really slow. By the time we got our first VCR when I was 14 -- complete with a fully corded remote control that only fast-forwarded -- I was more excited by Dawn of the Dead, mostly because it was in color and Tom Savini, the once-awkward Vietnam veteran that Romero had recruited to do all of his special effects (and appear in the film as one of the unhinged bikers), made all the blood and entrails look so realistic.
It wasn’t until I got to college and learned that horror films could actually mean something that I began to appreciate the particular genius of George Romero. If you’ve never seen Night of the Living Dead or the other two films in that trilogy, they are a great place to discover how young directors like Romero revitalized American horror films in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. Thanks to the runaway success of the 28 Days Later films, “The Walking Dead” comics and TV show, and the countless inferior knockoffs and parodies that Romero’s work has inspired, we are so inundated with onscreen zombies that they have lost most of their ability to shock us. Far worse, they no longer have meaning beyond generic monsters to be destroyed so that humanity can survive, and, of course, to provide the jump scares on which modern commercial horror sadly depends in the absence of actual fear-inducing stories. As Romero put it in Adam Simon’s outstanding documentary The American Nightmare, though, to him, “(the zombies) are us...I mean, we know we’re gonna die, right? We are the living dead…”
That concept -- that we are the living dead -- is the animating force behind each installment of Romero’s trilogy, and each installment contextualizes that idea within the sociopolitical landscape of its time. Night of the Living Dead hit theaters in October 1968 in the midst of a year that began with the Tet Offensive, saw the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy, lurched through the chaos of the Democratic Convention and its associated riots in Chicago, and would end with the election of Richard Nixon to the Presidency. From the opening scene -- siblings Barbara and John driving through the Pennsylvania countryside, which should be verdant but is rendered in washed-out black and white and appears utterly forlorn -- Romero captures the desolation of the American rural landscape amidst the tumult of the 1960’s. Alternating between scenes of an unlikely grouping of living humans trapped in an iconic American farmhouse and media reports that attempt to explain the phenomenon of the dead rising from their graves to feed upon the living, the film reveals a nation at war with itself as the repression of the 1950’s returns to devour the citizens of the 1960’s using the reanimated corpses that shamble across the country as the ultimate metaphor of social decay. The group in the farmhouse -- a black man, a young white couple, a middle-class family, and the unfortunate Barbara, who never recovers from the walking - comatose state she slips into during the opening reel -- comprises a compelling cross-section of middle America, and the conflicts that develop amongst this group as they attempt to ward off the endless waves of hungry corpses that surround them provide stark commentary on the racial and class tensions that defined the era. Though the film implies that law and order -- employed here in the most deliberate Nixonian sense -- will eventually be restored by the posses of sheriffs and well-armed rednecks who turn the invasion into an opportunity for keg-fueled target practice, the harrowing final credits leave little doubt that the resolution is worse than the crisis.
While Night is a crisis film, the 1978 installment Dawn of the Dead -- which is less a sequel than a variation on a theme -- is explicitly apocalyptic and considerably more aggressive in its commentary on its times. In this iteration, a TV reporter and the station’s traffic helicopter pilot team up with two SWAT commandos who understand that America’s cities are doomed -- underscored by the deeply unsettling scene below -- to a cycle of perpetual violence produced by the same racial and economic tensions Romero alludes to in the first film.
The group eventually holes up in a place that would become, sadly, the spiritual and cultural center of American society during the 1970’s until the age of the internet: a shopping mall. After ridding the mall of undead window shoppers, the four protagonists create a home within the mall, where they enjoy all of its material pleasures until they realize that they have constructed a prison which they can’t escape -- and the have-nots -- in this case, the living dead and a pissed-off biker gang -- will always be at the gates, threatening their consumerist “paradise.”
The third installment of the original trilogy -- 1985’s post-apocalyptic Day of the Dead -- tackled Reagan era-militarism. The zombies who besiege and eventually overrun the base are less symbols of repression than pissed-off stand-ins for the multitudes oppressed by American militarism and economic exploitation. The film offered the series’ most radical political statements in the form of its protagonists: an interracial gay couple, neither of whom are American, and a female scientist who are pitted against a hubristic Army colonel in charge of an underground base that is one of the last surviving bastions of humanity.
By the 1990’s, Romero’s films had lost some prominence due to the resurgence of considerably less thoughtful mainstream horror fare, but that didn’t matter to me when I re-watched these films time and time again in the living room of the midwestern Victorian I shared with my friends in college, retreating to the porch afterwards to smoke Marlboro reds and marvel at Romero’s genius and work together to decode, interpret, hypothesize, and talk into the night about all the different connections we could make to our own ever-expanding world and our ability to make sense of it. For me at that time, the notion that films that “serious people” and most “grown-ups” denigrated as schlock or camp fit only for midnight shows could actually be razor-sharp social critique was a revelation that opened all kinds of intellectual frontiers for me as I learned to read the world. I have George Romero (and John Carpenter, who is still with us and working as we speak) to thank for nudging me towards an undergraduate career spent analyzing 1950’s Sci-Fi films as manifestations of Cold War fears of everything from nuclear radiation to communism to female sexuality to mindless conformity and beyond.
I was still thinking about George Romero and his legacy when an alert popped up on my
phone that Martin Landau had died just a few hours later. While George Romero taught me much of what I know about monsters, Martin Landau was one of those actors who always taught me something about humanity. I first remember seeing him in reruns of “Space: 1999” (again on the giant Magnavox) and “Mission: Impossible” -- and even in those roles, he brought depth to stories that were sometimes a little thin. As I paged through various obituaries, I thought back to a trip I took to the “Live Mall movie theater” in Hadley, MA (as opposed, of course, to the “Dead Mall” Theater, which was not as nice and seldom got the biggest releases, but when you’re at Hampshire College in the middle of a bunch of farms and pastures and the weather is lousy, you take what you can get) in 1989 to see Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors. From the opening moment, Landau’s portrayal of Judah Rosenthal -- a well-respected opthamologist and philanthropist with a very, very dark side -- is a masterful in terms of his ability to convey human weakness in a dazzling variety of forms.
Sharing the screen with talents like Anjelica Huston, Jerry Orbach, and Sam Waterston, Landau creates Judah not as an amoral monster but as a deeply human character whose charitable intentions and good works are often overbalanced by vanity, greed, and an inability to control his impulses, knowing that his various positions of privilege will always afford him escape routes from consequences. As Landau explained, his interpretation of the character differed from the original vision -- and likely landed him the role.
Martin Landau gave many memorable performances -- lest anyone forget, one of his first major film roles was as James Mason’s secretary/erstwhile lover Leonard in North by Northwest -- but they all pale -- at least for me -- in comparison to his profoundly moving portrayal of Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood.
Though it won Landau an Oscar and Burton some of his highest critical acclaim, Ed Wood gets much less attention than it deserves. A stirring tribute to one of Hollywood’s greatest failures, the film captures the humanity and especially the vulnerability of its unusual cast of characters, ranging from Ed Wood, Jr. -- the genuinely self-made auteur who is remembered for a series of spectacularly awful films like Plan Nine From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda? -- to Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson, late-night TV movie hostess Vampira and more. The relationship between Wood and his idol Lugosi is the emotional center of the film, and as Landau explains it, becoming Bela was one of the greatest challenges of his storied career.
Losing one of these figures would have an impact on me. Losing them on the same day...let’s just say it took me back to a lot of different places. Thank you, George and Martin, for the memories and all the places you took me and the rest of us all these years.