The Mysterious Duane Jones
by Dennis Leroy Kangalee
Duane Jones and Marlena Clark in Bill Gunn’s 1973 classic “Ganja & Hess”
Enigmatic, handsome, intelligent. A face that could have been carved out of marble. Those pained brows, under which eyes fight to get out from under…or retreat into.
An actor whose presence in three of the most singular movies ever made assured his footprint in history, but his dark horse charisma alone channeled into horror genre alone have contributed to the depth and repeated viewings of these films, at times, just for his line readings, shrugs, or glances.
The living dead is what most terrifies and haunts us in movies and life; and it’s our incredibly dignified response to them - as actors- that makes them even more real and threatening than they are. Because it proves that the zombie, the death-riddled walking egg shell perpetually cracking underneath you, is something to take seriously and learn from.
Even when you are almost too cool to care.
Not that the great Duane Jones was calculated and distant; no he was cool in the classic manner of Black people being cool — meaning they don’t either lose their heads because they have seen it all before or they are so at ease they make it clear that they are not playing around.
Jones is of the former, and his distinguished life and career as an actor, lover of drama, and educator contains many lessons for us all. Especially this Halloween.
“The horror is not what is imagined,'“wrote French surrealist and dramatist Antonin Artaud (Theater and its Double), "but in what is real." Duane Jones as Ben in George Romero’s cult classic “Night of The Living Dead” - was essentially in two films within this one movie. The obvious zombie movie is the first, but the spiritual nightmare of America (not consciously crafted said Romero) is the real horror of the movie. For Ben is both the Everyman and the Perennial Black Man – trapped in the Western nightmare and crazy house called the United States of America
A frustrating aspect of horror movies is the insistence that they are removed from actual everyday life and have no real bearing on us. Sometimes movies jump at tropes or fashionable politics of the moment as Get Out did a few years ago.
I wonder what Duane Jones would think had he been alive to have witnessed not only Get Out, but the way in which the world continues to view Black people, race relations, horror and human conflict as exhibited in motion pictures (interesting thesis’ about Duane Jones and Lakeith Stanfield from Get Out was mentioned in Matthew Eng’s celebration of Jones in his 2021 Cineaste article).
Never an easy man to pin down, Jones as a screen actor always retained his classical bearing. In this way, he negated Denzel’s “look at me” approach to character acting as much as he willfully rejected what became the "Morgan Freeman persona" that was devised to counter Denzel's matinee idol appeal and early fiery performances. Freeman could be even more intense (watch him again in his first few films, "Street Smart" and "Lean On Me" --the clichés won't bother you because he is so engaging to watch), but he certainly was never mysterious like Jones and it would have been absolutely marvelous if Jones had broken into the mainstream and could have had opportunities to go against Washington or Freeman or James Earl Jones, an actor I would prefer to link him to - if only because of his staunch theater credits and his aloofness towards fame. Jones was internationally renowned and popular -- if only for Star Wars - but who cares? His interpretations of the play Fences alone is legendary. I imagine Jones would have brought something else, and new as well, to the 1980's rise of America's last great playwright, Mr. August Wilson.
But that even might have been too much. Jones was always a mystery it seems. To his acting students, his fans...maybe even to himself. And that is what is so intriguing and powerful about him.
The story is well known: he became famous as Ben in George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead, the film which instigated the notion of the modern zombie (referred to as "ghouls" in the movie) and was immediately controversial for several reasons. It showed emotional and physical violence in a way unseen before (that it was a "low-budget" film helped because the movie would have been silly and looked sanitized had it been shot in color with "clean" special effects), it was shot in black and white (already a metaphor - as it was released in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King); it shows an interracial group of people hurling Molotov cocktails at humanity's enemy, the ghouls (we know who that is)...and what later became an obvious, but overblown, trademark of the movie: the leading rebel of the film helping everyone not just fight the ghouls, but survive -- is an African-American man.
Much is made of this now in retrospect. And writer-director Romero claims that the racial tenor of the movie’s casting had no real impact on his conceit of the movie, he simply wanted the best actor he could find. That is perfectly acceptable, but it would have been impossible to make such a film apart from the zeitgeist of 1968. According to notes on his IMDB page, Jones did concede, "It never occurred to me that I was hired because I was black, but it did occur to me that because I was black it would give a different historic element to the film."
The part of Ben is as mysterious as Duane Jones is. We know little about him but Jones, at 31 years old, already brought his erudition and finesse to the screen, transforming zombie hokum into an engaging and tense drama. The lesser actors do better on screen because they are acting with Jones. And every so often, a blast of poetry fills the screen. The awkwardness, ridiculousness, even the moments of absurdity – become their own little pockets of truth. Romero originally wrote the part of Ben as a resourceful man, but rough around the edges and aggressive. Jones was able to bring himself to the role and by doing this he opened up a whole new level to the film. Ben is the anchor of the movie, the existential center. Always thinking, trying, fighting, and working hard to communicate to the rest of the trapped humans in the house, hiding as they must from the zombies outside. But his anxiety is always rooted with logic. His actions in the film demonstrate Jones’ agility, his theatrical prowess. He moves well on screen, his stealth always adding another interesting dimension to his character or the film itself.
When the film was released, Jones worried that his clinical approach to acting would be overridden by Ben's anger at certain moments. He was concerned, in the aftermath of King's murder, that Ben's own fury against the white ghouls in the movie would give ammunition for further riots in Black American ghettos. Well that did not happen and outrage was already in the culture by 1968 anyway -- whether political activism, poetry, theater, music -- even sports. There was a calculated, almost biblical defense to the grief and anger and violence shimmering within and around Black people in the United States. And for all Black people's emotionalism, no one has more finesse with anger in their art or performance than Black Americans. That's a fact, not an opinion. And it is the reason why the media has made fun of it and tried to exploit it in all the wrong ways for about sixty years now.
The iconic brooding profile of Duane Jones became iconic instantly in 1968 with “Night of the Living Dead”.
Our cerebral Black actors like Duane Jones, Forest Whitaker, Yaphet Kotto, Ivan Dixon, Christopher St. John, even Sidney Poitier -- shine a more laid back light, if not colder, on the urgency or heat of the moment. For Jones, in particular, his perfect foil was the late great Bill Gunn. Playing opposite each other in Gunn's 1973 horror masterpiece, Ganja and Hess, where Jones plays the mercurial wealthy anthropologist Hess Green who becomes addicted to blood and not only annihilates the neurotic artist Gunn plays - eager to be Hess' assistant -- he resorts to drinking the blood of other bloods (Black people) in the ghettos and other places "out of reach," where victims have no authority or power. The film is a meditation and phenomenal expression of many things and Hess' vampire denotes all the results of colonialism in fell swoop. A complex character, made all the more enigmatic by Gunn's non-linear editing.
Duane Jones and Sam Waymon in the ‘baptism’ scene in “Ganja & Hess”.
If Night of the Living Dead was guerrilla and rambunctious, Ganja & Hess is stately and authoritative. And while the perfunctory glimpses of blood drinking and "freakdom" are chilling, it is the tone of the film that is most unnerving. A horror film where the simple theatrical lighting, deliberate camera movement, and obscure dialogue are enough to make your skin crawl. One of the best moments they share together is the scene where George Meda (Gunn) and Hess retire into the living room after a pleasant feast. Meda recounts a story about working on a film in the Netherlands which climaxes with a terrible joke/sexual innuendo...and it's Jones' reaction that's actually funny: he has a headache and sees no merit or worth in Meda's ramblings. It is an interesting moment and both actors reunite less than a decade later in one of their final works, Losing Ground directed by the late Kathleen Collins.
In Losing Ground, Jones’ dashing appearance, romantic distinction and sense of humor is marvelously tailored to his character and remarkably used; he is a fantasy character to Seret Scott’s (hilarious!) miserable and unhappy married professor. It was the last decade of his life, and he seemed to have granted us with a warmer and more self-aware performance. Not having a prolific screen output, the movie choices (if they themselves have the power to choose) an actor makes is often an artistic choice in itself. Jones only made nine movies. Three however are cultural landmarks, classics in every sense of the word. I would imagine with all the teaching Jones did in the 1980’s that some of what we see in the seductive character of Duke in Losing Ground – emanates from one of his acting classes. You can see the fun he was having with the role.
What if Jones’ Ben… is the younger Hess Green in some way?
What is it that Ben and Dr. Hess possesses in these two very different horror films - that ground them in a way others probably couldn't? And what is it that Jones does that director's encourage him to do on screen?
Think.
Jones' logic is what undercuts any emotional blindness in Night and certainly what keeps his blood addiction in Ganja at bay. It's his buttoned-up tension, then his perfectly understandable (and relatable) resolve that we identify with.
Jones’ surgical righteousness, his anger in Night is not muted, it just progresses logically. It is Duane Jones’ intellectual rigor on screen that can be menacing to a white racist or hostile audience or the deeply insecure. Tall and handsome, his desire to survive and live in Night is akin to Dr. Spock somewhere trapped in a conundrum of how to best resolve a situation that doesn’t seem solvable.
Although he died quite young and remained far out of the spotlight, Jones was a committed theater artist and educator until the end of his short life. Even if only for Halloween, overdose a bit on Duane Jones’ funky performances and find a moment to see where the horror in those films lingers loud and large in our culture today. And resonates like very few horror movies do.
In an audio interview conducted shortly before his untimely death in 1988, Jones recalled an occasion during which he met with a group of his theater students at a local café near the Old Westbury campus on Long Island, New York, when they were suddenly awestruck at the film then playing on TV. Duane turned around and noticed that the movie playing on the television in the café was none other than "Night of the Living Dead" His students were amazed to see their professor on screen, because Duane rarely mentioned his movie roles to his students. After this occasion, the word spread that the Night of the Living Dead’s star hero was teaching at Old Westbury college on Long Island.
– IMDb