OK, so, here’s a mildly embarrassing anecdote about my initial experience seeing the 1973 version of The Crazies. I knew roughly what it was about and that it had a political element to it. But I somehow thought it was directed by John Carpenter. I’ve been working on filling in my Carpenter gaps, so when I found The Crazies on Tubi, I figured I’d give it a shot. I somehow missed the director credit mostly because the title came up saying the movie was called Code Name: Trixie, so I got a little confused and went to look it up to make sure I was actually watching the right movie. I was, but as I said, I missed the director credit and still thought this was an early John Carpenter movie. Then when I looked it up again later and saw George Romero was the director, and well…it actually made a lot more sense somehow.
I mean, it’s set in a small town in Pennsylvania. That’s, like, a sure sign it came from Romero.
The movie opens with two small children playing hide’n’seek at night when they hear someone breaking things in the kitchen. It’s their father. He’s already killed their mother, and then he sets fire to the house. That’s the first appearance of a virus, developed by the government, that will take the infected and make them, for the most part, violent and crazy if it doesn’t kill them outright. As this is a rural town in Pennsylvania, theoretically, it should be very easy for the Army to come in, gather up the town’s people in a quarantine, and hope the cynical, know-it-all scientist who worked on the virus can find a cure at some point.
Meanwhile, two firefighters who fought in Vietnam are trying to escape with one’s pregnant girlfriend, a teenager girl, and the teen’s father. No one is really telling them anything, so what is even going on is a real mystery as men in hazmat suits with rifles are just rounding up everyone without any sort of explanation and taking them to the local high school. And while there are still homicidal infected running around the town with whatever weapons they can find, the real threat may be the soldiers following orders more than it is the people with the highly contagious illness.
In retrospect, this is a really interesting choice for me since the COVID pandemic started.
Romero here has set up a movie that, technically, doesn’t have a protagonist. Sure, firefighter David (Will McMillan) comes closest, but he doesn’t know what’s really going on. Likewise, haughty scientist Dr. Watts (Richard France) might be the hero in any other movie, but in this one? Well, the government and the military developed the virus in the first place. Why should they be the ones to solve the problem? Instead, there is just a long montage of sequences as the soldiers in the hazmat suits just walk into people’s homes and take people away without a single word of explanation. And then there are the “crazies” who fight back, though props to the scene where soldiers are running from the crazy crowd, leaving dead on both sides, just for the sight of the woman in the rear with a broom sweeping the grass behind the others.
However, there are moments when this movie, shall we say, showed its budget. The crowd in the high school shows a lot of people who seem to be mostly having fun rather than being particularly scared of what’s going on or turning violent. Too many smiles for that. Likewise, when the town’s priest lights himself on fire, it’s obviously a dummy in some shots. Little moments like this might have worked better in Romero’s other great “plague” movie, the one that led to a franchise, Night of the Living Dead. There’s something about black and white that can cover up lesser special effects. I mean, Hitchcock got away with chocolate syrup for blood in Psycho. There’s no way that would have flown in color. But it’s little things like that that do detract a bit from a movie that has something to say about who the real enemy might be in scary times.
Grade: B
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