So you're hanging out with Roger Corman one day, thinking to yourself that it'd be cool to do your own picture, when he offers you an odd opportunity. Corman has Boris Karloff under contract with him for two days, and he's interested in using a new Karloff movie to promote his 1963 Victorian horror non-hit The Terror. The deal plays out like this - you've got to use Karloff for those two days and use stock footage from The Terror, which could add up to about 40 minutes, and then shoot the rest of the movie around that. Now you realize that you're Peter Bogdanovich and you haven't a clue how to make a modern horror movie work with a Victorian horror villain like the ones Karloff had been stuck playing for the past 35 years. Suddenly, you remember that a friend of yours had suggested that somebody make a movie about Charles Whitman, the ex-Marine who snapped one summer day in '66 and started shooting people from the top of the big tower at the University of Texas. After that and that guy who picked people off with a rifle on Highway 101 the year before, the threat of mindless spree murderers seemed like the real horror of our times (not to mention Vietnam), and certainly more relevant than The Terror's Baron Victor Frederick von Leppe. And that's when the winning idea pops out of your head like Athena and becomes Targets.
Targets begins with an edited version of The Terror, and once "The End" appears we see that it's being watched by Karloff and some movie guys in a studio dailies viewing booth. As it wraps, a loud 'n' slimy producer pitches Karloff (here named Byron Orlok, a sly double-vampire-reference) a new movie written by young director Sammy Michaels (Bogdanovich himself), and is disturbed to hear Orlok announce his immediate retirement. There is much fussing, but Orlok calmly swats the complaints down and leaves, with his secretary Jenny (Nancy Hsueh) and Sammy following soon after, as their futures depend on Orlok's continued career. As Orlok talks to the two of them while getting into his car, we suddenly see him through a gun sight, and that gun sight is controlled by clean-cut, 20-something Vietnam vet Bobby Thompson (Tim O'Kelly). He's supposedly buying the gun to practice target shooting with his dad, but we see him open his trunk and add it to a collection of about 20 rifles and pistols.
We cut back to Orlok sitting at home, arguing with Jenny and later Sammy (who are kind of a couple but not really but whatever), expounding on how relieved he is to never have to see his producer's face again. Sammy is particularly pissed because he thinks his new script is a big change of pace for Orlok and isn't anything like The Terror. Orlok admits to not having read the thing, and is mostly wondering about a public appearance he is supposed to do the next day at a drive-in promoting The Terror. This wondering doesn't keep him and Sammy from getting sloshed, though. Meanwhile, Bobby goes to shoot guns with his Dad, and after they pop off a row of beer cans his Dad goes to set them up again. Bobby points his rifle at his Dad, his finger nearly pulling the trigger, but his Dad turns around and sees him, chastising him for pointing a gun at a person; Bobby claims he was just checking the levels. That night Bobby watches TV with his parents and wife, and his wife starts to leave to go to her night job at the phone company. Bobby tries to talk her out of going, intimating that he has unspoken frustrations brewing. She ignores him, and after his parents have gone to sleep he goes to his trunk to get a pistol. He stays up, smoking in his completely dark bedroom, until his wife gets back from work. She doesn't get why he stayed up all this time, but he doesn't explain himself - and she should be worried.
Sammy got so drunk that he crashed at Orlok's house, and the next morning the two of them awake at the crack of noon to Jenny knocking on their door. Orlok tells her that he's decided to make the appearance at the drive-in, claiming it will be his last. At Bobby's house, Bobby finishes typing a note in red ink when his wife comes into the room, asking if he'll go to work today. Bobby pulls out the pistol he brought into the house and shoots her in the stomach as she closes in for a kiss. His mother runs in and he kills her, and then he goes into the kitchen and shoots a grocery delivery boy who was unlucky to be there. He then puts the bodies of his wife and mother in their beds and leaves; we see the note he wrote is a suicide note, saying that he doesn't expect to avoid death: "I know they'll get me. But before that many more will die." He buys a lot of ammunition and drives around, stopping at an oil refinery to sit on top of one of the tanks to snipe people on the freeway. He picks off some drivers as well as a refinery worker, and after some more driving settles on a drive-in for his Grand Snipe, parking early and climbing into the screen's supports, cutting a small hole in the screen so he can fire into the audience without being seen. As it turns out, the drive-in is having a special screening of The Terror that night.
If it wasn't made perfectly clear in the movie, the film's conflict is Old Horror meets New Horror, the Old being literary and the New being sociological. The story is an extremely clever solution to Corman's arrangement, capitalizing on how The Terror really has no place in the (then-) modern world. The UT tower shooting took place at a time when America wasn't used to senseless spree shootings, so while Targets may have seemed like a topical-grab at the time it's thesis has only become more true as the years have passed. The structure of the film might sound a bit tedious on paper, but Bogdanovich is very skilled and mature in his direction of the contrasting storylines, keeping the pace from dragging and paying attention to the lessons of the Old Hollywood Masters. The Orlok scenes are driven by witty dialogue and characterization, letting Karloff make a meal of his five days work; he was so impressed by the script that he worked three extra days for free, in spite of serious health issues (including emphysema and rheumatoid arthritis). I saw a documentary about Karloff's career that featured a relative saying that Targets should have been Karloff's last performance, and she was right - Karloff never got a better opportunity to display his charm, kindness and charismatic presence in his long career. It's a shame that he wasn't given more variety in roles, because he was a staggeringly kind man who could easily have played more sympathetic parts. Unfortunately he got saddled with an endless line of evil Barons and looming lurches, making Targets a kind of retrospective apology for Hollywood's oversight. The other actors do a fine job, most surprisingly Bogdanovich, essentially playing himself with a lot of understated, Joel Hodgson-style humor. Nancy Hsueh is chipper and professional as Orlok's secretary, looking quite fashionable and rolling with Orlok's kindly-yet-dated micro-racism.
As Bobby Thompson, Tim O'Kelly is disturbing in his clean-cuttedness, an adorable JFK type with death in his eyes. His storyline is driven by atmosphere, using long takes of what at first seems like padding to draw you into the final moments of his life. The first half of his story is mostly observing his perfectly nice home life, and the combination of unbroken scenes of nothing with background noise and his mysterious intentions do a lot to beckon you into the central question of any spree killer - why? There is no composed score for the film, just the natural sounds of his environment, and the absence of dramatization keeps the viewer from escaping from the thudding, dreadful reality of his murders. Any other approach with the character would have taken the viewer out of the movie, and because Bogdanovich's thesis concerns horror in real life any hint of theatricality would have made the movie trip over a clown and fall down the stairs into a stack of cream pies.
Targets was set to be released by Paramount in '68, but the tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy put the public off of watching people get shot by random killers. It was released much later to a limited number of theaters, and while it didn't make much money it established Bogdanovich in the biz and gave him the cred to make The Last Picture Show. The movie has never really found a wide audience, and its DVD has sadly gone out of print with no re-issue plans. While Targets is very much a product of its time its message is perhaps more relevant today than it was then, and it goes without saying that Karloff fans should see it immediately. For a first-time director Bogdanovich does a splendid job of balancing the two plots and unpretentiously engaging the viewer through a story that could have been a tedious self-pat-on-the-back in another director's hands.
Also, for a movie that is based upon pointing out how outmoded older storytelling can be, it's quite respectful of other aspects of the past. Bogdanovich had previously worked on a documentary about Howard Hawks, and in one of the more interesting scenes in Targets Sammy and Orlok watch Hawks' 1931 film The Criminal Code. Its significance is that it features Karloff in an important pre-Frankenstein role as a butler. I have no idea how his role affects the story (apparently a prison drama), but the two of them watch a scene where a silent, looming Karloff corners a young man, backing him into a doorway and shutting it behind him. The camera lingers on the closed door, and the soundtrack is dominated by the shouts of a prison riot happening next door. It's a wonderful piece of Old Hollywood direction, and Sammy comments, "The man really knows how to tell a story." It's a touching tribute to the great Hollywood directing tradition, and it is later mirrored when Orlok is talking with the drive-in people (including Sandy Baron as himself) as to what he could say to the crowd. He settles on telling a scary story, and recites the classic "Appointment with Death" tale in W. Somerset Maugham's version, "Appointment in Samarra". Karloff's delivery and presence is so dead-on that you can't help but feel a chill down your spine from a story you've probably heard three dozen times, and you're left wondering why in the Sam Hill he wasn't offered more dramatic work.
I was also left with a burning desire to watch The Criminal Code, so you won't have to guess what the next article will be on.
(You have got to be kidding me with this trailer...)
~PNK
No comments:
Post a Comment