Targets

Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968) The day after the insane shootings at the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, Glenn Kenny, in his fine blog Some Came Running, made a comment on it, without making a comment.  He simply took frame-grabs from Peter Bogdanovich's directorial debut, Targets.  One could only nod one's head in acknowledgement of the aptness.

The project started out as the most bizarre of industry favor-granting. Bogdanovich had done some work for B-movie king Roger Corman, and the AIP producer emeritus granted the writer an opportunity to direct his first project—with some stipulations: he had some work due from Boris Karloff by contract, and the aging horror star had to be worked into the storyline, and there were some left-over scenes from a past Karloff movie The Terror (featuring as well, a pre-star Jack Nicholson) that Bogdanovich could avail himself of.  Other than that, Bogdanovich could do whatever he wanted, as long as he stayed on-time and under budget—about $125,000.  With then-wife Polly Platt, who also served as production designer, Bogdanovich came up with a twisted storyline that followed two storylines that would come together at a drive-in theater, the favored venue of most AIP releases.  In his commentary for the film, Bogdanovich goes out of his way to acknowledge the considerable help he had in fashioning the script from director-writer Samuel Fuller, who fleshed out and added resonances to the story.

One of the stories follows Bobby Thompson (Tim O'Kelly), as typical a young American as can be.  He's sells insurance after having toured in Vietnam, wife's a nurse, and the young couple lives with the Thompson parents, where they have a normal domestic life of communal dinners (with grace said beforehand), and a family evening of television.  Son and Dad have a hobby of target practice, in which the son takes great pride in his accuracy, no matter the caliber, no matter the weapon.  Before the day is out, he'll grow weary of stationary targets.

Meanwhile, across town Byron Orlok (Karloff) is souring on the movie business.  He's just screened his latest low budget horror flick, directed by a kid, Sammy Michaels (played by Bogdanovich), who's pressuring him to star in his next film, while the studio is assuming that the star will keep churning the  stuff out.  But Orlok announces he's retiring—oh, he'll do publicity for this one, but, really, with the very real horrors going on in the world meted out by tin-gods and commonsters, what relevance is the costume theatrics he's appearing in.  He feels old, quaint, and antiquated, pretending horror when the world shows a proclivity for it with no bounds.

The two, Bobby and Byron, cross paths twice in the film, one completely unbeknownst the older star, and the other at a moment of destiny, when the two meet again at the world premiere of Orlok's new picture.  Both reveal their true selves at the drive-in, and the film ends, as Bogdanovich is wont to do, on a note of ambivalence.

The film was so good that Corman was able to sell it (at a profit) to Paramount Studios for release.  Bogdanovich fills it with telling cold-blooded details, especially in the planning and fulfillment of Bobby's activities, which become more and more erratic as things go astray from his plans, and those touches, some ironic, some despairing, are rich and feel like a tribute to the director the film is most in the style of—Alfred Hitchcock.  Hitchcock is always a good primer for film-makers starting out in the low-budget fields, as his films are like blueprints in basic film-making techniques—direct, bald, and effective.  But Hitchcock's subtleties—the stuff that fills the frame of the cutting scheme—are tougher to match.  And it takes a better breed of film-maker—like Spielberg, Bogdanovich, and DePalma—to take the Master's schematics and improvise with the form.  One can do all the planning one wants, but it's in the finishing touches that make a house a home, and a movie a film.

Shock Corridor

Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, 1963) If ever there was a title that needed an exclamation mark at the end of it, this was it. But, if you know Sam Fuller, gritty maverick director, and what he was trying to do with this bottom-of-the-barrel-budgeted pot-boiler, you know he probably wanted to call it simply "The Street," the nick-name for the communal "hallway" where the inmates of an insane asylum meet and greet...and interact, sometimes explosively, and reflect the madness of the world outside its walls.


Reporter Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck, sometimes good, sometimes bad) is investigating the murder of a patient at an asylum, looking for an expose to win a Pulitzer. he's been training for a year to pull the wool over the diplomas of those weisenheimer shrinks so he can get inside. His editor, "Swannee," is all for it, but his stripper girl-friend Cathy (Constance Towers) thinks it's a bad, bad idea...real bad. But she plays along, posing as the worried sister whose fear of Johnny's "affections" creates the police report that sends him up (This is one of those police departments that doesn't do background checks, or investigations of any kind). Johnny's encarcerated as a sex maniac, and we're thrown into the sordid exploitation stuff of sadistic guards, colorful loonies, and perversions. At one point, Johnny stumbles upon the woman's ward (Fuller cuts to a bug-eyed Barrett, realizing his situation and in echoe-y voice-over says one, hilarious word--"Nympho's!") and then is set upon, "Daughters of Dracula"-style in a genuinely creepy scene. Fuller walks a razor-thin line of silly exploitation and truly daring social commentary that slaps you across the face, and you realize--he's serious! Sure, Cathy gets a performance scene as a stripper--although she it's a rather stodgy dance routine with a torch-song to go along with it (she's Mrs. Sam Fuller, after all, gotta keep the wife happy), but once we know one psychosis from another, and Johnny starts to interview the witnesses to the murder, Fuller starts doing something deeper than giving jollies to the mouth-breathers. His three murder witnesses are all victim's of the State's insanities. There's Stuart (James Best) a Korean war vet and victim of brainwashing but, as it's made clear, he's just as brainwashed by the racist upbringing he recieved growing up in the South. Then there's Boden (Gene Evans) genius missile engineer, whose so unhinged by the Mutually Assured Destruction scenarios his inventions have been targetted for, that he cracks to the abilities of a six year old child, capable only of drawing and playing hide-and-seek (although it looks suspiciously like duck and cover the way he plays it). Finally, in easily the best performance of the movie, is Hari Rhodes as Trent, a former student, allowed at gun-point to attend a previously integrated college, and in his efforts to be five times better than the white students, cracks under the pressure, becoming as bigotted as the protesters who tried to keep him out. Where Evans and Best can't seem to hurdle a mental block from turning their roles into melodrama, Rhodes plays it absolutely straight and he's the guy you remember.


Does all this actually lead to finding out who the murderer is, and what happens to Johnny? Well, I think you can guess given Fuller's cynical view of things. But he's trying to do more with it, and equate the U.S. circa 1963 with the trappings of an insane asylum. That's a brave statement, especially for a B-movie exploitation pic. But that's usually where Fuller preferred to be. He could rise above his genre and budget. There are times when the dialog tries so hard to rise above its exploitation roots and prove that it's read a book or two that it approaches Ed Wood ponderousness. But the trunk of the thing is a joy to behold, despite all the cheap tinsel and gaudy patter.


And along the way, Fuller scores a few hits against the psychiatric profession: the first shot is of a psychologist straightening his crooked diploma, and at one point during his psych evaluation, the prepped Johnny thinks "This is where he's going to ask if I hear voices.." and the shrink asks, "Johnny, do you ever hear voices?" It's a funny scene, but it also shows the limitations of the profession's pigeon-holing of individuals. (Hey, Tom Cruise! I got your next remake project for ya!)

Ultimately, History is the judge. This cheap little grindhouse flick is part of the National Film Registry. That's not voices you hear. It's the echoing cackle of Sam Fuller.

Pickup on South Street

"Pickup on South Street" (Samuel Fuller, 1953) By the time Samuel Fuller wrote and directed "Pickup on South Street" for Darryl F. Zanuck* in 1953, he'd already had three tough careers, as an infantryman in WWII, as a street-wise journalist for a New York daily (he was the New York Evening Graphic's crime reporter at the tender age of 17!) and a pulp-fiction novelist and ghost-writer. Fuller knew the seamy side of life, knew how to portray it suggestively to avoid the censors but punch it up to make sure audiences picked up on it. Fuller's movies had a crusty vitality that few directors have successfully emulated (though many have tried). That sort of lesson you learn on the street, not in the video store.

"Pickup on South Street" has amazing sequences, starting with the opening gambit: a couple of fed's are tailing a call-girl, Candy (the soon-to-be-Mrs. Howard Hughes, Jean Peters), whose found some temporary legitimacy as a courier for her ex-boyfriend, Joey (Richard Kiley), when who should sidle up to her but professional pick-pocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark). He gets in close, uses a newspaper as a blind, then deftly violates her purse (no, there is no ambiguity here--Fuller edits it like it's a sexual act, cutting from the purse to a flushed-looking Candy). He intercepts something he doesn't expect--micro-film with industrial secrets. Soon he's being hounded in his squalid little bait-shack domicile by the cops, the fed's, the moll he buzzed, and the communist cell that Joey's really working for. What's a dipper to do? The patter is wise and rapid, the love scenes smoldering and intimate, and the fight scenes look like they hurt! A lot!** (There's a particularly nasty one with Peters and Kiley in which the camera hurriedly rushes back out of the way of the hurling bodies--the best thing about the fights is they look spontaneous and unchoreographed, and quite thuggish) It's hard to believe that Zanuck would approve this film, but he liked his B-roster rough and down in the dirt, and Fuller wouldn't have it any other way. However, just because these folks are all grifters, the cops are nasty creeps, they're all Good Americans, as opposed to the well-tailored, polite communists, and that's Fuller's punch-line to the whole magilla. You can practically hear his wheezing cackle.

* Fuller liked to tell the story of why, after making succesful B-movies he decided to sign a contract with Fox and Zanuck over the other studios. He asked the other studio-heads what they did with the profits from their movies. All gave advice on tax shelters. Zanuck was the only one who said, "We make better movies."

** The fight scenes kept the film from receiving a pass from the Production Code, and had to be filmed a few times before the film could be accepted for exhibition. As it is, Peters goes slamming face-first into a book-case, and Widmark socks Kiley over a subway turnstile, and drags him by his ankles down some stairs, his jaw hitting every step along the way.

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Richard Widmark died last week at the age of 93, just when we were getting to know him through a series of naturalistic performances in tough-minded noirs and detective films.


He burst on to the movie scene playing the giggling sociopathic thug Tommy Udo in Henry Hathaway's "Kiss of Death," famous for the scene where Udo kicks a woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs--it's Noir 101. It makes all the highlight reels. And for that, they nominated him for an Academy Award.


But Widmark had a real versatility, playing both heroes and villains and the various shades of gray. He could be counted on to be believeable in any extreme. And he could play your average "Joe"--but better. He was dependable, even as a gangster. And you never thought of his heroes as naive. Widmark conveyed intelligence in all his roles, whatever their moral stripe.


My favorite scene of his is an odd one: a long sustained rambling conversation in a held two-shot with James Stewart on a river bank in the John Ford "Two Rode Together." The two actors are just basically trying to convey the information and Ford probably told them to "make it interesting" (and if they didn't Ford would hector them for the rest of the day), and the two, Stewart and Widmark, are just jawing, improvising as they go, but it never feels like actors showing off--it's two veterans being people through force of personality, and long after the movie has faded from memory that little conversation--was it five minutes long?--remains with its prevarications, its annoyed pauses, and its subtle hilarity. I've seen DeNiro and Hoffman improvising. It's not nearly as much fun.


There are two more Widmark's on the docket waiting to be sprung on these pages, one directed by Jules Dassin, who also recently passed. He became for me, just before his death, one of the most interesting things to see in a movie, and when it's all rushing at you 24 frames a second, that's saying quite a bit. When someone dies just as you begin to really appreciate them, the loss is just a bit more palpable.