Synopsis:
Willard (Bruce Davison) is a socially awkward young man who lives at home with his unstable and ailing mother (Elsa Lanchester). He works in the office at a factory where he is both underpaid and bullied by his boss, Al Martin (Ernest Borgnine). One fateful day Willard discovers that he is able to communicate with and train the rats that live in his large garden and before long the place is overrun with them. He forms special relationships with two of their number that are super-intelligent creatures – a gentle white rat called Socrates and a more aggressive and dominant street rat called Ben. When a series of misfortunes and tragedies result in his personal life spiralling out of control, Willard decides to hit back at those who have made his life a misery by using the rats as a feral weapon.
Willard possesses many interesting narrative strands that serve to trouble the idea that the film is simply a generic “animals attack” drive-in horror movie. Indeed, the more straightforwardly dramatic sections of its story arc cleverly incorporate tropes that have been skilfully borrowed from a number of different genres. And director Daniel Mann uses these tropes to present some pretty well realized studies of the human predicament.
It transpires that Martin’s illicit business practices allowed him to swipe Willard’s father’s business so, rather than being the company vice president that he should be, our eponymous protagonist toils as an underpaid and underappreciated clerk. It seems to be an open secret that Martin actually murdered Willard’s father in order to facilitate the takeover and the fact that Willard has thus far been unable to take action against Martin in this regard is an early indication of his impotent nature.
It’s clear that a lack of personal funds and a newfound sense of responsibility for his elderly and unstable mother resulted in Willard remaining in the family home and becoming increasingly isolated and socially inept. Willard’s mother is domineering and needy but the near mansion-sized house that they live in is big enough for him to find his own space when he needs to.
But we can’t help but feel for Willard when the only attendees at his 27th birthday party are his mother’s gaggle of pensioner chums. His immaturity, the way that his mother and her pensioner friends infantilize him and the frustration that he feels when his mother makes demands of him – along with his need to rebel against her authority in small and childish ways – give the early portion of the show the feel of an angsty teen drama.
When Willard strikes up a friendship with a sympathetic office temp, Joan (Sondra Locke), Mann switches modes and the film becomes a kind of (belated) coming of age movie for a spell, with Willard finding himself on the verge of embarking on his first meaningful relationship with a girl of his own age. We’re really rooting for him to succeed but his lack of social skills and his growing preoccupation with his rats make the chances of a successful union appear slim.
Whether Willard really can communicate directly with the rats in a wholly meaningful way is open to question but his training techniques do result in them responding to his finger snaps and key words and phrases, such as “food” (in order to make them move towards foodstuffs) and “tear it up/tear him up” (in order to make them attack designated targets). Thus when the film nears its end it is perfectly primed for Mann to switch straight into revenge movie mode.
The rat wranglers led by Moe Di Sesso do excellent work here and good editing, eye-line matches and point of view shots tie all of the human-rodent interactions together nicely. The way that Mann shoots the scenes where Willard is seen lovingly training the rodents makes them look like cute and appealing little critters and, as a consequence, we soon come to regard the rats with a degree of affection too.
It’s actually Willard’s obsession with his rats – rather than their attacks – that generates many of the film’s moments of dread and suspense. Socrates and Ben come to fill the gap in his life that should be occupied by human friends. But when he starts carrying them about his person at home and in public and taking them to work, we’re presented with a series of tense scenarios that revolve around the very real possibility that the rats will be spotted or discovered by an unsympathetic third party.
Willard’s central narrative conceit – the idea that a human might become able to command an army of rats – may seem too fantastical for its nominally realist early 1970s setting but the film works really well, thanks in no small part to its excellent casting. There’s a feeling that Willard’s ensemble of actors gelled and their belief in and commitment to the material pervades the whole show.
As Willard, Bruce Davison is called upon to express a wide range of emotions in response to an inordinate number of slights, upsets, disappointments and traumas. He pitches Willard’s reactions somewhere between the expressions of knowing deep thought and silent menace that are associated with Anthony Perkins’ sociopathic characters and the expressive looks of confused exasperation and barely contained fury that Roddy McDowall’s oddball characters were often called upon to emote. In doing so Davison creates a convincing portrait of an awkward and disturbed young man that is his own.
Ernest Borgnine (The Wild Bunch) can usually be relied upon to come up with the goods in his own inimitable way and he plays the bullying, philandering and downright mean-spirited Martin with absolute relish – hence we’re ready for Martin to get his just desserts when the appropriate moment comes. Borgnine looks pretty trim here and when a desperate Martin cuts loose in a violent manner he looks like he could do real damage to Willard.
Elsa Lanchester (The Bride of Frankenstein) carries an aura of old school class and charm about her even at this late stage of her career and she does good work as Willard’s overbearing mother. A number of familiar faces appear alongside Lanchester as her pensioner friends. Sondra Locke’s turn as Joan is pleasing enough and it might well be the most sympathetic, appealing and convincing performance of her career.
Willard is a worthy if somewhat idiosyncratic film that remains hard to pigeonhole. Promoted as a horror film, the show played in popular cinemas and drive-ins and was a box office success. Reviewed retrospectively, the film probably has more in common with the more outré New Hollywood films of the time than it does with bog standard “animals attack” horror movies or contemporaneous exploitation flicks.
Indeed, the well-realized dramatic plot points and locations that it shares with films such as Noel Black’s Pretty Poison (the factory setting, the disgruntled lowly employee, the awkward young man slowly getting close to a pretty girl) and Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (the opulent old money mansion house setting, the young man’s strained relationship with his mother, the isolated young man’s friendships with older folk) suggest that it might be more appropriate to position Willard on the outer limits of New Hollywood’s corpus of films as opposed to sandwiching it between the likes of George McCowan’s Frogs or William F. Claxton’s Night of the Lepus.
Willard is also quite interesting at a stylistic level. There’s nothing too remarkable about the film’s cinematography but a number of its key scenes do feature noticeable combinations of striking and contrasting colours: at times it looks as if the show’s art director (Howard Hollander), set decorator (Ralph S. Hurst) and costume designers (Eric Seelig and Dorothy Barkley) were working in unison to produce a stylized colour scheme that fell somewhere between that of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows and Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Feast. And some wonderfully expressive lighting comes into play during Willard’s final confrontation with Martin.
One technical aspect of the film that does cause some frustration is veteran soundtrack music composer Alex North’s score. While it’s not completely incongruous, there are sections of the show where North’s music appears to be too grand and ebullient and thus a little ill fitting. Maybe a more doom-laden score would have made this intriguing little film too dark a proposition for its producers?
Second Sight’s Blu-ray presentation of Willard is a beauty. Mastered from a 4K scan of the film’s original camera negative, the show’s striking colours really pop off of the screen. The film’s sound quality is excellent too. The extra features include a fun interview with Bruce Davison.
