The Dirty Rat

Glowing reviews in esoteric genre periodicals drew me to attend a university screening of Jonathan. Fortunately the film was preceded by Murnau's Nosferatu, which made the outing worthwhile.

I found Jonathan to be a pretentious, self-important, amateurish, shoddy and ugly mess masquerading as serious art.

Midway through the loosely-structured film, and appropos of nothing, a scene occurs in which a prisoner in a dungeon stomps a rat to death. The pointless scene goes on endlessly, the camera indifferently documenting the act in long-shot.

The rat involved is a real, living animal. Its lingering torture and death takes place before your eyes. Because it takes several minutes for the rat to be entirely reduced to a broken chunk of bloody meat, there is plenty of time to be fully aware of the poor little thing's suffering.

At this point I walked out on the film in furious disgust.

I understand that the film exists in variant editions. I also have read that the rat's onscreen mutilation and other scenes of brutality were added after the film was completed. Nothing could induce me to countenance this atrocity again in any form and I utterly condemn this worthless piece of crap.