April 15-21, 2004

screen picks

by Sam Adams

The Thing/The Crazies (Fri., April 16, 10 p.m., $9, Broadway Theater, 43 S. Broadway, Pitman, N.J., www.exhumedfilms.com) Exhumed Films' astutely programmed double-bill brings to mind the oft-quoted line from Walt Kelly's Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Actually, in John Carpenter's The Thing, the enemy just looks like us; the origin of the peril that attacks a group of polar researchers hasn't changed from the Howard Hawks-directed 1951 original, but it's significant that the phrase "from another world" has been dropped from the end of the title. The change signifies not just Carpenter's A-list pretensions versus Hawks' B-movie cunning, but a fundamental shift in the underlying logic of the horror film, an understanding that new horrors would come from within, not without. Night of the Living Dead's zombies came out of the ground; by the 1978 Dawn of the Dead, they were shopping at the same malls as the living.

The new direction was prefigured in 1973 by Night/Dawn director George Romero's The Crazies, the second half of Exhumed's bill. Romero, among the most perceptive and intuitively gifted directors to work in the genre, begins the film with a quick-building sequence that starts in domestic safety and ends in madness. Two children, awaking to a new day, observe their father behaving strangely, and go to wake their mother. When they pull back the sheet, they realize her throat has been cut. The children's natural instinct is to turn to their father for explanation; unfortunately, he's busy setting the house on fire. Preceding the recent wave of Japanese mass-psychosis thrillers by decades, The Crazies draws no comforting lines between the sane and the mad. By the time you know the difference, it's too late.

None Without Sin: Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan and the Blacklist (Sat., April 17, 8:30 p.m.; Sun., April 18, 4 p.m.; Mon., April 19, 7 p.m.; $8-11, Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St., 215-446-3033) Given its PBS origins, it's not surprising Michael Epstein's documentary is evenhanded to a fault -- an approach that ill-suits the story of Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller. Despite the fact that Miller stood firm against the House Un-American Activities Committee while Kazan infamously named names, both artists at their best demanded that their audience choose sides, while None Without Sin, from its namby-pamby title on down, goes beyond objectivity into vapidity. Referring to communists as "those with unpopular beliefs" is insulting to both sides, vapidity masquerading as objectivity. (Victor Navasky's Naming Names, for one, takes both American communists' freedoms and their threats to undermine the U.S. government seriously.) Bending over backward to avoid bashing Kazan, None Without Sin falls on its ass.

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