PESTORY: How a rat named Ben conquered America
By Michael Moran
In the summer of 1971, American moviegoers lined up around the block to watch a man train rats. Willard, based on Stephen Gilbert’s novel Ratman’s Notebooks. The film, which I saw five or six times in one day on Jerome Avenue in The Bronx where I was staying with my cousin Jack, starred a young Bruce Davison as Willard Stiles, as a meek office drone who befriends the rats in his basement.
But the rats were the real stars. Socrates the gentle one, Ben the ambitious one, had more personality than half the people in my Catholic school 5th grade class. Willard is what we might today call an incel, and eventually tired of being kicked around he deploys them against his tyrannical boss, played by Ernest Borgnine (himself an Oscar-award winning pro but best known to many from the TV series McCale’s Navy).
Willard turned out to be one of that year’s surprise hits. Borgnine, offered a choice between a higher salary and a percentage of the box office, took the cash up front. That was the wrong decision.
Hollywood did what Hollywood does: it greenlit a sequel and promoted the rat. The next summer, Jack and I were again hanging out on 205th Street, listening after we were supposed to be sleeping to west coast Yankee games and Top 40 WABC radio with the lights out in 5th floor bedroom. One of the tunes playing constantly was the sickly sweet “Ben”, sung by a 13-year-old Michael Jackson (it was apparently originally written for Donny Osmond). Jack and I hated – hated – that song.
“And you, my friend will see You’ve got a friend in me.”
Ugh.
But Ben the movie was another story, and as we did with various Bruce Lee films and The Poseiden Adventure (those hot pants!), we binge watched it down on Jerome Avenue in the summer of 1972.
Both Willard and Ben left the critics cold, but Jack and I didn't give a damn. The song left us cold, of course, and it won the Golden Globe for best original song and earned an Oscar nomination, too. It lost out to "The Morning After" from The Poseidon Adventure, which was sung in the movie by a glamorous blonde lady, though not in hot pants, unfortunately.
The surest proof that Jack and I were right and the critics wrong about these rat films arrived on newsstands in March 1972 in the form of Gospel truth: MAD Magazine put its Willard spoof on the cover of issue #149. In 1970s America, you hadn't truly made it until MAD made fun of you — an honor Ben shares with The Godfather and James Bond.
Why did audiences love the rats? Partly the era — early-'70s cinema loved an underdog revenge story, and Willard was the ultimate worm-turns fable. And partly because rats fascinate us precisely because they unsettle us: intelligent, social, adaptable and always closer than we'd like to think. (Little did I know that Dr. Bobby, our star advisor, was busy across the East River in Brooklyn starting his own rat-filled journey. I haven't asked him about these films. I'll send him a link to the blog. I am willing to be he loved them).
Half a century on, I still remember the glow of Jack's Emerson stereo, his mom (my aunt) Rita popping hear head in and says, "Get to sleep, you two!" and the excitement of sitting in that movie theater by the elevated #4 train waiting for the lights to go down.
"Tear him up!" became something we kids said back then, just like another generation might have said "Luke, I am your father" or "Frankly, Scarlett, I don't give a damn."
I had no idea back then that rats would be with me decades later every single day. As a reporter for decades, I used to cover politics and war. Now, with Microshare, it's rats and mice. (And toilets thrown in for the bargain!) It turns out, one was good preparation for the other.
Michael Moran is CMO, Chief Risk and Sustainability Officer at Microshare
Check out previous Pestory episodes on the Pestory blog page, including the once unknown tale of how field mice that helped the Soviets win the Battle of Stalingrad: "How field mice changed the course of WWII."