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TARGETS
9/10
USA
1968 (copyright-dated 1967) : Peter BOGDANOVICH : 90 mins
What Roger
Corman said was, “I want you to take twenty minutes of Boris Karloff footage
from The Terror, then I want you to shoot twenty more minutes with
Boris... and then I want you to shoot another forty minutes with some
other actors over ten days. I can take the twenty and the twenty and the
forty and I’ve got a whole new eighty-minute Karloff film. What do you
say?”
"Sure.”
Peter
Bogdanovich
More than
three and a half decades after its initial (unsuccessful) release, Targets
remains a cracking, entertaining and thoroughly original thriller.
And, if that wasn't enough, it also stands as a terrific inspiration to
any aspiring film-maker - especially one lucky enough, like Bogdanovich,
to work underneath a producer like Roger Corman.
Except there
never really has been anyone in Hollywood - or anywhere else - like Corman,
whose ad-hoc 'film-school' nurtured the likes of Scorsese, Coppola, Sayles
and Jonathan Demme. While each of those auteurs came up with promising
work for Corman, Targets remains the one masterpiece to have emerged
under the producer's direct auspices. Because while severe budgetary and
time limitations almost always compromised even the most talented directors'
artistic visions, Bogdanovich managed to turn these 'restrictions' into
strengths.
Working with
a Fassbinderish speed and intensity, he wrote and shot the whole thing
in less than three weeks for a reported $125,000. His use of Karloff is
especially ingenious - resulting in arguably the horror veteran's most
powerful screen performance in what may be his finest ever film. The eighty-year-old
Karloff plays himself in all but name as 'Byron Orlok,' an eighty-year-old
horror veteran who stuns his producer by announcing his retirement: what
use, he asks, are the old-style celluloid shockers in a world so full
of actual horrors? This comes as especially bad news to Sammy (Bogdanovich),
the hotshot young director who'd hoped to provide Orlok with fresher material
via a script set in a recognisably real world.
As Orlok mulls
over Sammy's proposal, he agrees to one last personal appearance - at
a drive-in cinema where his latest release is to be premiered. It's here
that Orlok comes face to face with real-life bloodshed in the form of
Bobby (Tim O'Kelly), a psychotic sniper who lurks behind the screen, picking
off audience members with his rifle...
One of the
first American films to tackle the problem of gun violence head-on - made
when Michael Moore was still in short trousers - Targets is also
way ahead of its time in terms of narrative: it soon becomes clear that
the (untitled) script Sammy wants Orlok to appear in is Targets,
the film we're watching unfold. Foreshadowing the likes of Wes Craven's
New Nightmare and Being
John Malkovich, Targets could be cited as one of the first
serious post-modern films in the American cinema - just as the Karloff-Bogdanovich
collaboration represents a passing of the torch from the 'old' Hollywood
to the 'new.'
And it's entirely
appropriate that Bogdanovich (although only a so-so actor here) should
be the one on the receiving end of the transaction: out of all the directors
of his era, he was the one most knowledgeable and admiring of, and in
direct touch with, his 'golden-age' predecessors. Targets pays
overt tribute to (among others) Hawks, Fuller and Hitchcock, but does
so with a verve and economy that transcend mere pastiche. "All the
great movies have been made," Sammy sighs - a statement which Targets
goes on to emphatically disprove.
By concentrating
his camera on the more humdrum corners of Hollywood, meanwhile, Bogdanovich's
film stands alongside the likes of Point Blank, Memento
and Punch-Drunk Love
as incidental time-capsules charting the fascinating geography of
backwater Los Angeles. Several scenes at the climactic drive-in have the
rough edge of documentary, all the more poignant and affecting if you
know that no trace of this particular (Reseda) drive-in now exists. Then
again, perhaps this is appropriate in a film in which death and obsolescence
are continual presences, hovering just around the next corner...
23rd April,
2004
(seen 21st March : CineSide,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne : public one-off show)
* quoted in
How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime
(1990) by Roger Corman and Jim Jerome.
NB - if you
can't see Targets on the big-screen, the 2003
DVD edition is strongly recommended. This features a very entertaining
and informative director's commentary by Peter Bogdanovich, in which he
pays moving tribute to Karloff and acknowledges the advice he received
while making the film from luminaries like Hitchcock, Hawks and, most
of all, Sam Fuller.
For other
films rated 9/10 and 10/10 check out our Hall
of Fame
by Neil
Young
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