Targets

By far the scariest thing in Peter Bogdonovich's maiden film, Targets, is the interior decorating.  A product of the late sixties, the film's characters  live in rooms painted faint purple, strange tones of aquamarine and baby-shit yellow.  The rooms are sparse, but adorned with lights shaped like the coronavirus (balls studded with weird wart-like protuberances) and the color of marigolds.  In the master bedroom, the blue sheet on the bed matches a blue lampshade.  In the kitchen, where the formica is spotless, the roll of paper towels is also a kleenex-blue color.  Even the home of the wealthy hero, Byron Orlock (played by the elderly Boris Karloff) is a kingdom of schlock with pink coral highlights and awful kitschy furnishings.  At one point, Bogdonovich, imitating Hitchcock, aims his camera at a nasty-looking beige carpet, full of mismatched seams, and, then, tracks for a half-dozen yards finally tilting up to expose a madman's note, typed in red print.  The note is less alarming than the carpet and this seems to be the point of the showy shot.  This trash aesthetic extends to the exteriors:  when Orlock rides to a public appearance at an outdoor movie theater in Reseda, the car traverses a Hades of new and used car lots, one after another on a gruesome commercial strip.  The camera surveys the carnage as Orlock exclaims "God, what an ugly town this has become!"  (The scenery reminds me of old Highway 12 west of Minneapolis where the road passed several miles of up-scale car dealerships before reaching the Pompeii-red and round as a storage tank Cooper Cinerama -- a neighborhood that my peckish German teacher at College described as "quintessentially American.)

Bogdonovich, who began his career working for Roger Corman's American International, a purveyor of low-budget horror films as well as bikini girl and motorcycle pictures, was told by the boss to make a picture that used Karloff (under contract to the studio) for two days.  Other than that there were no constraints except for budget, which by the look of things, was microscopic.-- Bogdonovich mostly shoots on location without much in the way of professional lighting.  The scenes at the drive-in movie theater are very, very dark -- he didn't have the benefit of modern film stock or digital processing that allows today for realistic tones and contrasts in night shots.  Bogdonovich cast himself as Sammy, a young director working for a studio like American International -- when he was about 25, Bogdonovich was just about handsome enough to make a convincing leading man.  The film is wonderfully efficient and well-crafted, indeed, an enjoyable minor classic with some indelible images.  There's a double-plot that comes together at the climax; it's absurdly contrived but filmed with such conviction that you don't notice the deficiencies until after the closing credits.  Corman also told Bogdonovich that he was supposed to intercut footage from Karloff's previous movie for the studio, a ghastly thing appropriately called The Terror.  Targets begins with Karloff/Orlock stalking around in one of the studio's cardboard dungeons -- there's a young girl who has swooned and is scantily clad, a surfer-boy hero, and a flood that rips down walls while the scene keeps cutting away to a raven flying through the sky.  The film-within-a-film ends --"The End" the titles tell us -- and, then, Bogdonovich's picture begins.  We're in a screening room.  Orlock (Karloff) announces that he's retiring.  (He was 79 or 80 when the film was made.)  This upsets Sammy who has written a script just for the old man -- in it, Orlock gets to play himself.  (Presumably, the script is Targets).  Orlock has an Asian-American secretary who is having an affair with Sammy -- the stuff about Chinese proverbs and the girl teaching Orlock Chinese has not aged well.  Orlock, who is playing Karloff, is the "monster man", famous for his portrayals of monsters and maniacs in horror movies.  Of course, he's a polite old English gentleman with a taste for Scotch whiskey.  Orlock is humiliated that he has to appear at a drive-in in Reseda to promote The Terror and he tells  his secretary to book a flight to New York and a boat trip to London -- he's going home after thirty-five years in Hollywood.  Meanwhile, a spookily polite young man named Bobbie is buying guns and ammunition.  He's not doing well -- with his pretty wife, the young man lives with his parents.  Whenever, he addresses his father he calls him "Sir."  The young man is like Beaver from Leave it to Beaver! grown up and armed to the teeth.  When he and his father go out target shooting (the kid is an ace), he trains the gun on his domineering father and almost shoots him -- when the older man turns his face to his son, the young man is cowed. Sammy and Orlock get drunk after watching Howard Hawk's 1931 The Criminal Code -- in that film, Karloff plays a menacing figure.  "My first big role," Karloff says.  Sammy, as a cineaste like Bogdonovich, praises Hawks' ability to tell a story with pictures.  Karloff tells a story with words, delivering a spectacular rendition of the old chestnut "Appointment at Samarra".  Across town, the young man shoots his wife and everyone in his family and, then, buying more ammunition goes out to tank farm, a facility with big fifty-foot high white cylindrical tanks.  He takes a sniper position atop the tallest tank and murders a half-dozen motorists driving by on the freeway.  (While laying out his arsenal atop the tank, he nonchalantly sips on a coca-cola and eats a Twinkie -- in those days, Coke came in 8 ounce bottles that you had to open with an opener and was something that you didn't gulp, but demurely sipped.)  After a police chase, the kid hides inside the screen of the outdoor movie theater, poking a  hole through the white canvas so he can slaughter the people in their cars come to see Orlock and the picture.  Orlock is a trouper and has decided to make his appearance at the theater.  Thus, the film has contrived to hinge-together the two plots with a dramatic confrontation at the outdoor movie drive-in.  In the final scene, we see the drive-in lot at dawn -- everyone has gone except for the killer's car still parked alone in the big field of posts for the speakers and parking lots.

Bogdonovich stages the sniper scenes with exciting aplomb and relishes the chaos at the out door movie theater.  The picture has an excellent sense for time -- we can measure the sun setting and air turning blue and, then, dark at the outdoor drive-in.  There are fascinating and poetic documentary style shots at the Drive-in -- we see the peculiar sociology of these places, now almost entirely extinct:  the playgrounds, the projection booth, the kids necking in cars, the concession stand, all of these things are lyrically represented.  In an early shot, the camera pointlessly tracks with Bobbie as he walks from his car into the family house.  You wonder if Bogdonovich hasn't yet learned that you can edit out footage that doesn't communicate anything much -- but there's a method to his madness:  later, during the massacre of the family, Bogdonovich relentlessly tracks the killer in long takes and, then, ends the sequence with bravura survey of the carpet.  The camera's obsessive focus on the sniper (modeled on Charles Whitman, the University of Texas killer) is signified by this seemingly meaningless extended tracking shot early in the film. 

The famous film critic, Manny Farber described "termite art" as low-budget, unassuming entertainment that inadvertently documents the era in which it was made.  "Termite Art" can't afford to create a seamless imaginary world but, instead, continuously allows the surrounding reality to seep into the picture.  Targets is a classic of Termite Art.

(Bogdonovich supplied commentary on the showing of Targets that I watched on TCM on April 4.  He doesn't look well.  His trademark goggles looked as if they were smeared with vaseline and he was wearing some kind of soft brace or cast on one of his forearms.  He appeared by Skype and, when asked by Joe Mankiewicz about his father's reaction to Targets, began to weep.)