BEN (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

I stated in my review of the 1971 WILLARD that the real star of the movie was the unhinged fellow of the title, who befriended a pack of rats living in his house and trained them to kill for him. However, I don't think the rat-master of WILLARD's sole sequel is nearly as strong a character, and for that reason it's the titular alpha-rat Ben and his rodent-buddies who provide the central menace.

Naturally the rats still require a sympathetic human to give them sanctuary, particularly since the story of BEN takes place immediately after the death of Willard. Thus the cops (led by Joseph Campanella) and the animal control officials are aware of a rat infestation in a suburban neighborhood. Ben and his kindred are given shelter this time by another outsider, this time Danny Garrison (Lee Montgomery), a little boy with a chancy heart condition. Danny's more vulnerable to discovery than was Willard, because the youngster lives in a house with both his sister (Meredith Baxter) and his mother (Rosemary Murphy), but somehow the young child does manage to conceal a rat-pack in his basement. The two women even think Danny's prattling about Ben just indicates an imaginary friend.

One dramatic problem with BEN is that someone-- probably not returning writer Gilbert Ralston or new director Phil Karlson-- made the decision to make the rat-wrangler a more sympathetic figure. In WILLARD one knows that the protagonist is so put-upon that he's bound to commit retaliatory violence sooner or later, and the script provides a very suspenseful buildup to that conclusion. But although there's one incident when Danny turns his rat-friends against a bully, Danny isn't angry at anyone. The rats are the main source of the menace because of their prolificity. (At one point a character mentions that there are more rats in the world than people.) As the cops and other officials begin to ferret out the rodents' lairs, the beasts respond with more mass-attacks on humans. And though the rats are never precisely sympathetic, the script allows Ben to escape the humans' extermination efforts, leaving matters open for a sequel that (fortunately) never came to pass.

The downside of having a less obsessed rat-master is that the pace of BEN is slower than that of the first film, so that I for one was more aware of how much this theatrical film looked like a TV production. It's certainly not a bad film, but I doubt that BEN carries much cachet these days, beyond the factoid that a young Michael Jackson warbled the movie's theme song.