Remembering Duane Jones: A Boundary-Breaking Black Actor (Web Exclusive)
by Matthew Eng

A handsome, reedy Black man swoops into view from under the cover of nightfall, his chiseled profile partially illuminated by the blinding lights of the porch on which a terrified white woman stands. We have just watched this woman, Barbra, run amok through an abandoned farmhouse that is her only hope for refuge from the advancing zombie infestation that has already claimed the life of her pesky brother Johnny. Too distraught to ponder the thought that making herself inconspicuous might help her avoid becoming zombie chow, Barbra has already screamed, cried, sprinted, flailed, panted, and convulsed her way through the first fourteen minutes of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) before Ben, the Black man, even enters the picture.

Something odd happens when Barbra, played by Judith O’Dea, first lays eyes on Ben, played by Duane Jones, from underneath her still-intact flipped, blonde bob. She drops the theatrics and stiffens, growing still for the first time in the film. It is clear to our eye and to hers that this man does not resemble the bruised and pockmarked undead that are encroaching upon the house. Yet, the look on her face isn’t one of relief, but rather perturbation and bewilderment.

Ben’s abrupt arrival into the movie provokes a quieter yet no less reflexive fear in Barbra, whose debutante looks suggest someone whose parents would have probably placed a Nixon sign in their front yard. She is unquestionably shocked by the presence of this Black man to the point that she can’t take her eyes off him. Once Ben has pushed both of them back into the safety of the house and locked the door behind them, her gaze follows him suspiciously around the room as he gets down to the zombie-busting business at hand. Amid Barbra’s shock, Romero pulls off one of the slyest, neatest transformations in cinema, revealing Ben as not only a protagonist on a par with Barbra but, ultimately, the true hero of this horror classic.

In a feat of color-blind casting, Jones, a thirty-one-year-old acting student from New York, auditioned for and nabbed the role of Ben, a character whose race had never been specified in Romero’s script. When asked about his decision to cast an African American actor as the gallant center of a film with an otherwise all-white cast, Romero said, “Duane Jones was the best actor we met to play Ben…Consciously I resisted writing new dialogue ’cause he happens to be black. We just shot the script.” Before he died in 1988 at the all-too-early age of fifty-one, Jones had lived many lives as an actor, an academic administrator, an educator, a scholar, a director, and an executive overseer of the Black Theatre Alliance. He worked on just nine films in his lifetime, including Bill Gunn’s perverse vampiric romance Ganja & Hess (1973) and Kathleen Collins’s groundbreaking independent drama Losing Ground (1982).

But it is Night of the Living Dead that has emerged as a bona fide landmark in the decades since its release and has caused Jones’s image, if not his name, to linger in the cultural memory. As Ben, the actor is a fount of calm and rational focus who stands in striking contrast to Barbra’s pitiful, near-relentless hysterics and, later, her catatonic inarticulacy. Furthermore, in a cast of amateurs who oscillate between blankness and belligerence with little fluency, Jones’s performance establishes Ben early on as by far the most eloquent and sensible of the film’s characters, the only one with a feasible plan for staying alive. 

By the middle of Romero’s film, Ben has elected himself as both the leader of this ragtag, housebound gang and Barbra’s stalwart protector, the latter a role we might not think twice about were the role inhabited by a white actor. Thirteen years after Emmett Till was viciously murdered at age fourteen for a wolf whistle he never made, there is something undeniably peculiar about watching this young Black man stick his neck out, time and time again, for a highly distressed white damsel who has never shown him a trace of kindness or fellow feeling. We can only speculate about Ben’s psychological motivations—what he might be trying to prove—when he demands that Barbra stay upstairs with him, rebuffing the invitations of Harry (Karl Hardman), a buffoonish and clearly racist white patriarch, to instead safeguard Barbra down in the basement with his wife and soon-to-be-zombified daughter. But Jones brings a strange, unthinking sincerity to Ben’s upstanding guardianship of this utterly helpless girl/woman, his regard for her more paternalistic than erotic. Erotics never even enter the picture here, and certainly not in what would have been, back in 1968, an extremely taboo dynamic. 

Ben’s moral rectitude in these scenes might inspire one to label him a savior not too far removed from the courteous, sexless, bridge-building gentlemen characters that stifled Sidney Poitier’s creativity in the same decade that Romero’s film debuted. But that would mean overlooking the vexation that Jones conveys in his interactions with the condescending Harry, a man he so palpably hates that he reserves three bullets for his death when the latter tries to overpower him and usurp his leadership. Just as meaningful is the character’s bruised yet nuanced dignity, evinced in the gestures that Romero’s camera smartly lingers on and all that is not said but indicated in Jones’s attuned performance; he sneaks in subtextual insights about the lived, concessionary realities of being a Black man in America that are unexpressed in the words of Romero and cowriter John Russo’s screenplay.

In one scene, Ben impatiently raises his voice at a shrieking Barbra, only to stop himself, reconsider, and soften his tone, perhaps registering the fear that never fully disappears from her eyes. Later, Jones looks away with discomfort as Barbra complains about the heat in the house but refuses to remove her coat in his presence. On Jones’s face, we can make out the chagrined reaction of a Black man who is often and uncaringly made to know his place, even when working in the life-or-death interests of white people. The occasional stiffness of Jones’s performance comes to feel less like a limitation of the actor than a mode of survival for the character, his constraint a daily precondition even as the world falls apart around him. 

Night of the Living Dead ends when a posse of policemen spot Ben hiding out in the house and, mistaking him for a zombie, shoot and kill him at once, executing him by the dawn’s early light. Jones’s death in the film, rather than his life, has allowed Romero’s film to function as a radical and indelible condemnation of American racism. One might say that these white officers do not recognize Ben as human, but one could also say that they recognize him as that which they have long recognized as subhuman. In the age of #OscarsSoWhite, in which Black actors are seldom acknowledged by mainstream awards bodies for playing any role that resides between the sliding scale which separates extraordinary historical figures like Harriet Tubman from chronic, fictional sufferers rooted in centuries-old racial stereotypes, Jones’s Ben remains a rarity: the African American everyman, or perhaps anyman. 

Half a century later, amid this decade’s spate of police brutality cases and other acts of anti-Black terrorism, it is interesting that in the final moments of Get Out (2017), writer/director Jordan Peele chooses to reassure his audience by rescuing his Black protagonist from a fatal police run-in, rather than going with his initial gut instinct. In Peele’s original ending, the character of Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is arrested by the police, who believe they’re protecting a white woman who we know has in fact tricked and tortured our hero, nearly stripping him of his bodily autonomy. 

In thinking about Get Out alongside the classic that directly influenced Peele and ensured his film’s existence, it is not Kaluuya’s vulnerable but finally victorious protagonist who immediately recalls Jones’s Ben, but the transformed character of Andre, played by the great LaKeith Stanfield, who is kidnapped in the terrifying prologue of Get Out, only to emerge in a later scene, zombified in a way we cannot yet fathom and uttering the film’s title warning during a brief flash of clarity. Stanfield’s wounded eyes and lanky physicality as this marginal, doomed character put me in mind of Ben, whose tragic fate in Night of the Living Dead is made only more pitiful by the young death and abbreviated career of the actor who gave him life. (Of particular poignancy: Jones died of cardiac arrest in July of 1988; in just nine months, two of his closest collaborators, Collins and Gunn, would also suffer untimely deaths, the former of breast cancer at the age of forty-six and the latter from AIDS-induced encephalitis at fifty-four.)

Outside of Romero’s film, Jones delivers one of the sexiest performances of all time as an atypically restrained and laconic vampire in Ganja & Hess, powering its central romance with a carnal magnetism that he summons while barely moving a muscle. His self-possessed subtlety in Gunn’s audacious film is a mystery unto itself, as it is in Collins’s Losing Ground, where the actor cuts a poised and debonair figure as an actor who becomes a tantalizing romantic alternative for Seret Scott’s adrift and unhappily married philosophy professor. Yet, as today I watch the chameleonic Stanfield hop from role to role with little repetition between assignments, I cannot help but wonder what Jones might have been permitted to achieve in this increasingly progressive era for Black representation in the arts. Jones’s place in film history is secure thanks to Romero’s film, but what might have American cinema—or its theater, which is where Jones’s heart seemed to truly lie—looked like had this charismatic actor, along with his equally constricted peers, been allowed to exercise and expand his craft, to surprise audiences with the multitudes that were ultimately left invisible? There is a potential in Jones’s locked-in performances that will never be explored, a possibility we can only detect in all that the actor does not reveal. His self-controlled expressions always manage to signal deeper, more complex feelings residing just beneath the peace of Jones’s bearing, the looks of an actor eager to disrupt the screen with the full, tumultuous range of his artistic expression. 

Matthew Eng is a Brooklyn-based writer and critic whose work has previously appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Reverse Shot, BuzzFeed Reader, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Hyperallergic, Little White Lies, and Tribeca Film, among other publications.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 2