The Crazies. 1973. USA. Written and directed by George A. Romero. Based on novel The Mad People by Paul McCollough. With Lane Carroll, W.G. McMillan, Harold Wayne Jones, Lloyd Hollar, Lynn Lowry and Richard Liberty. 35mm. Courtesy of Arrow Films and the American Genre Film Archive. 103 min.
Cynicism about the military industrial complex wasn’t exactly a fringe position in 1973, but George A. Romero’s The Crazies is scathing nonetheless. When a military plane carrying a secret bioweapon crashes near the sleepy town of Evans City, Pennsylvania, the unsuspecting locals watch in terror as their formerly friendly neighbors turn into homicidal maniacs. Amid the mayhem, a pair of firemen (and, significantly, Vietnam War veterans) named David and Clank lead a small band of survivors attempting to escape both the growing number of infected townspeople and the military’s doomed, scorched-earth attempts to control the contagion. But, this being a Romero film, their prospects don’t look so hot. Though these ordinary lives are destroyed by a fictional biological weapon, the specter of real-life Vietnam-era coverups and environmental abuses—specifically the indiscriminate exposure of US servicemen and countless Southeast Asian civilians to the carcinogenic herbicide Agent Orange—hangs heavy over the film.