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While Monster Boomers were growing up with horror hosts on TV, Aurora monster models on their bookshelves, and monster cards in their Munsters metal lunch boxes, they were blissfully aware that was what seen as scary fun was to be supplanted by real scares--and they were not a bit fun. Assassinations of American leaders and daily carnage on the TV news from Vietnam would morph into bloody schoolyard shootings and, ultimately, the horror of 9/11--and, in a way, all of it was foretold in a film starring horror icon Boris Karloff. As a result, we note, sadly, that...
The year 1968 was teeming with terror on film just as it was in real life. America was in the midst of social revolution, rioting, assassination, war and madness on multiple levels. On movie screens we met Rosemary’s Baby, experienced the Night Of The Living Dead and journeyed to the Planet Of The Apes, only to find we were home all along. These films were benchmarks in fantastic cinema that reflected our anxieties of the time. In the case of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the uncertainties of technology ultimately gave way to a sense of optimism for the future. But back on earth, 1968 remained a year of turmoil and tragedy. Into that mix came another film, less celebrated perhaps at the time, but destined to take its own place in cinematic and horror history.
Director Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets efficiently and unsettlingly bridged the gap between gothic horror and contemporary terror by intertwining two stories, each with a central character and the periods they represent ultimately clashing head-on in the film’s riveting climax. Representing the old school of fright was its headmaster, Boris Karloff, himself near the end of his life and portraying an elderly film star named Byron Orlock.
Intending to retire, Orlock grudgingly attends a drive-in theater showing of his latest movie (in fact, ample footage of Karloff’s 1963 film The Terror). Also in attendance at the event is a young man (Tim O’Kelly) who started his day by casually shooting his own wife and his mother dead, followed by an afternoon of picking off unwary motorists on the nearby freeway. (Two other views of Targets) Targets operates something like a frame narrative, using Roger Corman's The Terror (1963) to create a "movie-within-a-movie". The effect is much more than a conceit, insofar as the subject of art is art itself. The Terror is a ludicrous dress-up fantasy, less regarded today for Karloff's generic appearance than as the vehicle for Jack Nicholson's first film role. Yes, Jack's in it, a mere youth pretending to be a French lieutenant, lost on a lonely Baltic beach as he makes his way home from one of the Napoleonic wars. And there's Boris hanging out in his castle with his fake raven and coffins, lost in a parody of his former self, that is, the pedigreed psychopath of the Romantic revival. But it's an excellent counterpoint for the grim, sophisticated story Peter Bogdanovich has to tell in this, his first film.
Thus Targets is a story about the
B-movie business, which is often the exploitation of fear... and the irrelevance of this
culture in mid-sixties America, then undergoing a new kind of fear, a societal subversion
from within and without... mass killers like Charles Whitman in Texas... and Sergeant
Medina in Vietnam. It was the beginning of something new, the loner with a gun, often with
a motive less defined than his urge to kill. * * * This is not a film about gun control (though
some prints have a prolog that makes it sound that way), nor is it really a film about a
killer (except as he represents the frightening world around us that we cannot control but
must deal with) -- this is a film about destinies and inevitability. We are fated, it
seems to say -- we all die, but some deaths are more random than others and some
confrontations are inevitable before the end.
An important point that Bogdanovich
understood, which the makers of "Two Minute Warning", another sniper film,
apparently did not, is that the best way to portray the true terror of this story is to
focus tightly on the killer, leaving his victims (for the most part -- one particularly
scarifying sequence in the drive-in at the end that shows us in tight sharp focus the
results of his marksmanship serves to emphasize the point) nothing but distant,
anonymous…targets. As the assailant (based on real-life murderer Charles Whitman), O’Kelly appears as the embodiment of all-American white bread virtues. Clean cut, immaculate, respectful, and with an uncanny sense of order, whether carefully placing the bodies of his first two victims into their beds or having the foresight to prepare a lunch to enjoy during his shooting spree from atop a gas tank tower.
The short anticipatory breath prior to each bullet fired tells us the boy really loves what he’s doing. Next he ducks into the aforementioned drive-in where after dusk he quickly stages his impromptu encore performance from inside the screen itself. As Byron Orlock, Boris Karloff is essentially Boris Karloff, though with a few differences. The real Boris would never formally retire, choosing instead to work almost to the very end, despite deteriorated health. His scenes with his Targets co-stars (including director Bogdanovich himself as Orlock’s director pal) depict a weariness with the film business and with the changing world around him.
Karloff’s portrayal deftly combines just a dash of melancholy with a sense of humor and a reluctance to take things too seriously until the real world and the reel world collide in the film’s closing moments. Karloff owed Roger Corman two days work from their previous collaboration. Corman challenged protégé Bogdanovich to make a film using new Karloff footage along with scenes from The Terror. With lightning speed the young director complied, shot the scenes with Karloff and company, then combined additional footage filmed of O’Kelly and another group of actors.
All this from a script drafted by veteran director Samuel Fuller (who selflessly declined to take credit). On the Paramount DVD’s alternate commentary track, Bogdanovich acknowledges not only appreciation to Fuller, but to several other prominent influences including Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang and Howard Hawks. The result is a fascinating thriller coupled with an equally impressive scene-by-scene recollection of experiences during the making of the film. In addition, the DVD presents perhaps the clearest widescreen presentation yet of this controversial landmark film which had the box office misfortune of being released shortly after the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.
Nothing much has changed, as the director points out in regard to the ease with which practically anyone can still purchase a firearm. Snipers remain in the news. The story and the message are as timely as ever. The film is at once perversely funny and as disturbingly potent as ever. Set your sights at once on Targets. Thanks Joe. Targets does seem on the surface to be a film that specifically takes on the subject of gun control, but it certainly has a deeper meaning--that terror, real terror, stalks all of us, a terror that outstrips anything that has been seen on film. With the 9/11 tragedy and the ongoing threat of escalating international terrorism, Targets is surely one of the few Sixties "message films" whose message is still just as relevant--if not more relevant--today. Article copyright © Joe Winters |
