Willard (1971)

Willard was big in its day. At least we thought so at my grade school. I remember kids talking about it. I read the Mad magazine version and eventually saw the thing on broadcast TV.

Willard (Bruce Davidson) is a pitiful office worker in his late 20's. He lives with his mother (Elsa Lancaster) in an old mansion. His boss (Ernest Borgnine) somehow stole the business from Willard's father and is mean to him. 

His mother wants him to kill the rats in the backyard, and, at first, Willard takes a sadistic glee in his preparations to drown them. Then he takes pity on them and begins to train them. More and more of them appear.

The movie's slower than I remember and I thought he murdered more than one person. He really wasn't very nice to the rats considering how helpful they were to him. They were like the henchmen in a James Bond movie, mindlessly sacrificing themselves to achieve the supervillain's goals no matter how stupid. It got a GP rating back then, which may have been slightly different than a PG rating.

It was perhaps an Ayn Randian tragedy with Ernest Borgnine as the one true Randian Ubermensch; Willard, altruistically caring for his elderly mother and expecting help from her and his father's old friends, brings about his own destruction. The rats represent the masses who Rand despised.

They should have taken a straight Communist line. The rats were pretty much pawns in a battle between two cruel, parasitic capitalists who only pretended to care anything about them.

I notice it didn't say in the credits that no animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture. I was more afraid FOR the rats than of them.

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