Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane
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black. But it did occur to me that because I was black, it would give a different historic element to the film.”
While still earthy and capable, Ben acquired an at once intense and understated quality that Jones brought to the role. According to the late Karl Hardman: “His [Ben’s] dialogue was that of a lower-class/uneducated person. Duane Jones was a very well-educated man. He was fluent in a number of languages.” A B.A. graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, Jones had dabbled in writing, painting, and music, studied in Norway and Paris, and was completing an M.A. in Communications at N.Y.U. between Night shoots. “Duane simply refused to do the role as it was written. As I recall, I believe that Duane himself upgraded his own dialogue to reflect how he felt the character should present himself.”
A look at the original script (courtesy of Marilyn Eastman, who’d saved the only known existing copy) demonstrates the difference. When white Ben first arrives at the house, he says to Barbara: “Don’t you mind the creep outside. I can handle him. There’s probably gonna be lots more of ’em. Soons they fin’ out about us. Ahm outa gas. Them pumps over there is locked. Is there food here? Ah get us some grub. Then we beat ’em off and skedaddle. Ah guess you putzed with the phone.”
As translated by Duane Jones, the same speech goes: “Don’t worry about him. I can handle him. Probably be a whole lot more of them when they find out about us. The truck is out of gas. The pump out here is locked—is there a key? We can try to get out of here if we get some gas. Is there a key?” (Ben tries the phone.) “’Spose you’ve tried this. I’ll see if I can find some food.”
Same basic information, but in the original script, white Ben is a stereotype. Via Jones’s interpretation, black Ben is not.
According to soundman Gary Streiner, “Ben was Duane in most every way. Duane was very intelligent, thorough, and professional. If he wasn’t on camera, he was running his lines or just plain reading. Duane was not chatting people up when not working, but you were never waiting on Duane because he didn’t know his lines. I think he adopted his interpretation of Ben in the casting session and for evermore was the holder of the character.”
Hardman approved of Jones’s approach and adjusted his own performance accordingly. “Duane played the character so calmly that it was decided I should play Harry Cooper [Harry “Tinsdale” in the original script] in a frenetic fashion with fist-clenching and that sort of thing, for contrast. There was absolutely no working up into character. Harry Cooper started up with a hardass attitude, and he did not deviate one iota.”
Jones also contributed what proved to be an important component in perfect synch with the zeitgeist, an element vital to the film’s runaway success: black rage. In that pre-“blaxploitation” era, Jones’s Ben emerged as a cross between contemporaneous characters in a Sidney Poitier vein (e.g., In the Heat of the Night’s Virgil Tibbs, Lilies of the Fields’ Homer Smith) and the edgier African-American protags, like Richard Roundtree (Shaft) and Ron O’Neal (Superfly), who would soon change forever the image of black men on screen. While he earned audience support, Jones’s Ben made for an unusually harsh “hero,” even shooting an unarmed Harry Cooper in cold blood (though it would be hard to say he didn’t deserve it).
But that was a large part of the point: Ben wasn’t a hero. He was an average guy, an everyman of any ethnic stripe, who simply reacted to an irrational situation with strong survival instincts and a competence that, though far from infallible, surpassed that of his five adult companions trapped in that zombie-besieged farmhouse.
Since Ben’s character was written sans a specific ethnicity, there’s never any overt reference to race in the film—not even in those heated shouting matches between Ben and Harry (though one senses the ever-seething Harry’s unvoiced bigotry). Yet the character’s black identity undeniably adds another layer of anger to the pair’s ferocious battles for alpha-dog status. Ben’s blackness also lent greater tension to his relationship with the alternately comatose and hysterical Barbara. As Russ Streiner admits, “We knew that there would probably be a bit of controversy, just from the fact that an African-American man and a white woman are holed up in a farmhouse.” When Barbara claws at her clothes, citing the house’s unbearable heat, the scene suggests a subtext of sexual repression and fear. John Russo points out: “And then she falls into his arms. And I know that a lot of the bigots in the country are going to be thinking, ‘Oh my God, now what’s he going to do? He’s got this white woman in his arms,’ and lays her down on the couch and he unfastens her coat…and so I was aware that it might have those kind of vibes.”
A panicky Barbara then angrily lashes out. “It was written in the script that Barbara was to smack Ben at least three times,” says actress Judith O’Dea. “But this was a very sensitive issue for Duane Jones at that time and he said, ‘I can accept being smacked once. But I don’t want to play it the way that you’ve written it.’ It was rewritten…I gave him a smack. And he gave me the fist—right in the face.” When Ben punches Barbara, a white woman—this before Poitier’s groundbreaking smack of a racist aristocrat (Larry Gates) in In the Heat of the Night—that act supplied another envelope-pushing note to the proceedings. Those scenes provoked palpable reactions in audiences of the day.
Jones himself had opposed the punch, rejecting the idea that Ben would behave in so violent a manner. Russo concurs with that evaluation, “It really is out of character for him to hit her, but we needed him to because we had to get her unconscious for the sake of the plot. The truck driver, the other character, would have hit her.”
Jones, in general, proved notably nonviolent. Says Romero: “He hated any kind of firearm—he really hated that gun. So we had to have somebody hand it to him. It had to be taken from him right after. He had to take one of the boards off the wall and he hit my camera. He couldn’t work for like an hour!”
Jones received on-the-job gun training from jack-of-all-trades Lee Hartman, who did quadruple duty as a background reporter in the newsroom scenes, a funeral-suited zombie, and a posse member: “Duane Jones never shot a rifle before, so I let him have mine. I said, ‘Keep it against your shoulder.’ It was a 30–30 rifle. ‘Aim it at the bottom of that tree there.’ He was aiming at the top. ‘It’s gonna go a mile and a half if you miss it.’ He had a real bullet in there; we didn’t have any blanks.” Despite his antipathy toward weapons, Jones quickly got the hang of it.
One thing the actor consistently did not want to back down from was his character’s color. “Duane actually thought we should take note of it,” says Romero. “Now I think we probably should have. Not to make it a big point, but to refer to it at least. We had written this guy as angry for no reason at all. But that automatic rage that comes out, that would have been an interesting overlay. Duane was the only one who knew this.” Romero also allowed that if they had consciously played the race card, the results might have been heavy-handed, disrupting Night’s delicate balance.
At one point, when the filmmakers considered lensing an alternate ending that would permit Ben to survive, it was again Duane Jones who stood firm. “I convinced George that the black community would rather see me dead than saved, after all that had gone on, in a corny and symbolically confusing way.” Besides, said Jones, “The heroes never die in American movies. The jolt of that and the double jolt of the hero figure being black seemed like a double-barreled whammy.”
Many audiences perceived the parallel between America’s increasingly violent civil rights struggles—particularly, the then-recent assassination of Martin Luther King by racist hitman James Earl Ray, with the suspected cooperation of the FBI—and Ben’s execution at the guns of the redneck posse at film’s end. Without a black actor in the lead, Night would still have been an innovative shocker but wouldn’t have hit the cultural nerves it did.
In 1987, shortly before his premature death from heart failure the following year, Jones granted Fangoria journalist Tim Ferrante an extremely rare, exclusive in-depth interview, wherein the actor—who’d largely shunned his association with the cult hit, adopting something of a “Ben there, done that” attitude—revealed his feelings about working on the then-twenty-year-old film: “Even when I wanted people to leave me alone about it, I never regretted that I did it. I remember it as great fun. We