The Rat Pack

Willard is a low-budget chiller about a revengeful young man and his army of lethally trained rats (TIME, July 26). The rumor goes that when one executive heard that his company was involved with the film, he was furious. "You're nuts!" he exploded, and demanded that the bloodiest rat scenes be cut. Grislier heads prevailed, the scenes remained, and last week on the Variety box-office chart, Willard was not only in the top spot but was outgrossing Love Story by almost 10 to 1.

Gilbert Ralston, who wrote the screenplay, sees Willard as "a rat morality play. It's based on the concept that man carries within him the seeds of his own destruction. The evil he does will turn back on him." That it certainly does. Willard (Bruce Davison) is an underachiever in his 20s who likes rats but is also something of a rat fink. He stands by spinelessly when his mean-minded boss (Ernest Borgnine) kills Socrates, one of his pets. Socrates' best friend, a rat named Ben, witnesses the act. It is thus easy, when Willard gets fired, for him to persuade Ben to lead the pack on a fatal late-night visit to the boss. Later on, however, quite on his own, Ben sees to it that Willard himself meets a similar end.

Nibble on People. Most audiences root for the rats, sometimes yelling a resounding "Right on, Ben!" when he leads the cast of hundreds in the charge on Willard. Moe Di Sesso, a wildlife trainer who works out of the San Fernando Valley, spent a full year assembling, casting and coaching Ben, Socrates and the others. "As soon as a rat was born we'd start handling it," Di Sesso explained. "Then we taught it to do specific things."

One of the specific things was chewing doors. The teaching method? Simple: "We smeared the doorjambs with peanut butter." Another task: to nibble on people. Di Sesso's son, 18, spent a good part of three months lying down in a large box, his body covered with peanut butter, while baby rats ate their fill. "We kept adding more and more rats until finally we had 200 crawling over him," says Di Sesso. Young Di Sesso admits to having been a bit frightened at first, but by the end "I was laughing out loud." Reason? They tickled.

Staying the Course. It was then up to Director Daniel Mann (Butterfield 8, The Rose Tattoo) to put the rats through their dramatic paces. He may well go down in cinematic history as the Cecil B. DeMille of rodent movies: the rats swarm through Willard as if they were born to stardom. There was one problem, though: getting enough rat shrieks for the sound track. With a watchful fellow from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in daily attendance, the sound men had to be crafty. One day, when the A.S.P.C.A. man was not looking, they copped a couple of squeals by squeezing the rats' tails and used the recorded sounds countless times over during the course of the film.

As for Davison and Borgnine, at first it was thought that they would use doubles, but both decided to stay the course themselves. In the scene where the rats attack Borgnine, prop men stood overhead and poured the live furries down on him. One rat, obviously carried away with the drama of the moment, drew a little Borgnine blood. No matter: after a quick tetanus booster (for Borgnine), both were back in action.

Of all the rats he has worked with, Ben is the most gifted, according to Director Mann. At one point Ben stands on a mantelpiece and stares grimly at Willard. "I actually felt that Ben was acting," says Mann. "I never saw anything look that mean." Naturally, to cash in on Willard's smashing success, a sequel is in the works. For all his fans, it will star and be titled Ben. Unemployment may be rampant in Hollywood, but not for real rats.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.