The Thing With Two Heads

Year releasted: 1972

by Nathan Rabin
March 27th, 2002

Since the nation's birth, artists have searched for a metaphor profound enough to capture the strange, complicated, and often tense nature of American race relations. Few such images have been as direct as The Thing With Two Heads, which posits America as a two-headed freak combining the body and head of a hulking, wrongly imprisoned black man and the withered head of a racist white doctor. Free To Be... You And Me veteran Roosevelt "Rosey" Grier plays the convict, while Ray Milland plays a top transplant surgeon whose interests tend toward the "mad" side of the scientific field. Wheelchair-bound and terminally ill, Milland spends his days perfecting his head-transplanting technique on a surgically altered two-headed gorilla that boasts twice the banana-stealing prowess of a regular primate, but also a nearly uncontrollable temper. Convinced that the transplant process will work on humans, Milland decides to experiment on himself, although he's less than pleased when he wakes up to find his head attached to the body of death-row inmate Grier. Grier is similarly horrified to find himself playing host to the head of an antiquated Oscar winner, and the Grier/Milland creature promptly escapes Milland's attendants and sets out to prove Grier's innocence. But his/its attempts are complicated by the machinations of the state governor, who consented to the transplant and understandably fears that the press will concentrate on his role in creating a grotesque two-headed freak of science. The governor sends the police in hot pursuit of the Grier-Milland atrocity, leading to an epic chase that poignantly mirrors America's own attempt to escape the "police pursuit" of racism. Milland, meanwhile, lets it be known in no uncertain terms that he does not appreciate having his head grafted onto the body of a "black bastard," in the process giving new meaning to the phrase "internalized racism." The creature eventually heads to the house of Grier's lady friend, but just as it seems that Grier is on the verge of proving his innocence, his body is taken over by Milland. Milland's attempt to remove Grier's head backfires, however, and Two Heads ends with Milland's detached head meekly begging for a new body, while Grier drives away gingerly to the cheery strains of the Mike Curb Congregation's "Oh Happy Day."