That film was a crime thriller called Targets and I will get to the movie itself but I am more interested in why it got made.
First some background.
Peter Bogdanovich was a darling of the film scene in the 1970's as a bold new director for a new generation of filmmakers, directing such movies as The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon and his ode to the wacky screwball comedy What's Up Doc? which I wrote about here.
Well, "darlings of the film scene" have got to get their start somewhere and Bogdanovich got his working for Roger Corman.
Roger Corman (who sadly passed away this past May) was a director and producer whose output was... to say "prolific" is to underestimate his capacity for film production. If you needed a movie made cheap and fast, Corman was your guy. If you wanted that film to also be good, well, your mileage may vary.
It was under Corman's guidance that a number of now famous directors got their start:
- Francis Ford Coppola
- Ron Howard
- Martin Scorsese
- Joe Dante
- James Cameron
And yes, also Peter Bogdanovich.
Bogdanovich was doing time in the Corman film factory as a production assistant and picking up some 2nd unit filming while bugging Corman every chance he got to let direct a movie.
Corman relented but gave Bogdanovich an interesting challenge for this first feature.
Roger Corman had famed golden age horror film actor Boris Karloff under contract and Karloff had fulfilled that contract.
Except for two days. Karloff still owed Corman two days on set.
So Corman's directive to Bogdanovich was to craft a full length movie around Boris Karloff even though Karloff would only be available for two days.
Which brings us to Targets.
Byron Orlok (Karloff) is a bitter old horror movie actor who very abruptly decides to retire from Hollywood and return to his native England to die.
Orlok views himself as a relic of old-fashioned horror that pales to the horror in real-life news stories.
However, after a full court press from young writer/director Sammy Michaels (Bogdanovich) and some sage advice from his secretary Jenny (the luminescent Nancy Hsueh), Orlok relents to make a final in-person promotional appearance at a Reseda drive-in theater showing one of his classic movies before leaving Hollywood for good.
Meanwhile in another part of the movie....
Bobby Thompson is a young, quiet, clean-cut insurance agent who lives in the suburban San Fernando Valley area with his wife and her parents.
Thompson is obsessed with guns and acts a bit squirrelly but no one seems to notice.
Thompson gets up in the morning, writes a note to confess to killing his wife and mother in law and his intent to kill many more people.
Then he kills his wife and mother in law and leaves them to kill many more people.
He does this by taking a position on top of a storage tank by a freeway and begins popping off people as they drive by.
When his killing spot is compromised, Thompson books it to find another place to kill many more people.
Hey how about the Reseda drive-in showing that old Byron Orlok movie?
This is where our two entirely separate movies are about to converge.
Thompson starts shooting at people in the drive in.
He's shot Jenny! You bastard! (Relax, she's wounded but not killed.) Byron Orlok is pissed off and goes to confront the shooter.
Thompson is disoriented by the person marching towards him is also the person on the giant screen behind him. Orlok disarms Thompson with his walking cane and ponders that this pathetic weasel is the new monster he's supposed to be afraid of.
Thompson is arrested by the police. The mass murderer is actually proud of what he has done, bragging that he hardly ever missed.
And that brings us to the end of Targets.
_________________________________
So I wrote about why this movie got made but there's some backstory on how it got made that I find interesting as well.
The scene where Thompson is using people on the freeway for his personal shooting gallery had as an obstacle that filming on or near the freeway was not permitted.
The freeway shooting spree was filmed guerilla-style over a two-day period. Actors and stunt people in cars had to pretend to be shot and careen off the road without involving all the other regular people driving on the freeway.
Also that whole whole sequence was filmed without sound in order to save money. All audio effects were added later in post production.
Limited to two days shooting with Boris Karloff, Peter Bogdanovich bolstered Karloff's presence in the movie with scenes from the 1963 film The Terror and 1931's The Criminal Code with Karloff's scenes in those movies representing Byron Orlok's movie career.
Boris Karloff does a 100 second single-take performance of W. Somerset Maugham's retelling of the Babylonian fable Appointment in Samarra. I guess this is Bogdanovich's way of foreshadowing the two separate threads of our movie are destined to meet and they will impact one another. But if nothing else, it demonstrates that Boris Karloff is very damn good at telling a story.
I was quite taken with Nancy Hsueh in the role of Jenny, smart, quick witted and sexy as hell and not in the movie enough. Man, I was royally pissed off when Jenny got shot near the end but was very grateful she survived.
Life imitates art: after playing the soon to retire actor Byron Orlok, Boris Karloff himself would return to England and did not make another American feature film.
In the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, American filmgoers were not eager to see a movie that gun crazy nut case mass murderer and Targets was a commercial flop.
Nevertheless, Targets was well-received by critics, and was included in the 2003 book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.
Targets is not necessarily a movie I would recommend but it is a good showcase to see a master like Boris Karloff work his other worldly charm one last time and it is a great example of the low cost, gonzo film making associated with the Roger Corman movie making enterprise.
Tomorrow I will have a 2nd Dave-El's Weekend Movie Post with a classic silent film from 1929 that was thought for decades to be lost.
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