Point Blank (1967)

Director: John Boorman

Writers: Alexander Jacobs; David Newhouse; Rafe Newhouse

Based on The Hunter by Richard Stark

Actors: Lee Marvin; Angie Dickinson; John Vernon; Keenan Wynn; Carrol O’Connor

Cinematography: Philip H. Lathrop

Music: Johnny Mandel

Running Time: 92 mins.

Neo-noir begins in L.A.

        Something happened in 1967 that changed the way we view movies and altered our idea of what film was capable of. It was a turning point year in Hollywood that brought in a cinematic golden age of innovation unequaled since the 1930s. A new generation of filmmakers appeared on the scene who were free agents, independent of the old studio system, and free to turn their individualistic style of storytelling into reality. Directors like Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde), Mike Nichols (The Graduate), and John Boorman (Point Blank) pushed the envelope that year, breaking new ground and creating examples that filmmakers have followed ever since.

           John Boorman’s Point Blank is a neo-noir--- a film noir produced after the classic period (1940 to1960), but maintaining the basic elements of the classics (e.g Double Indemnity 1944): psychological crime story, involving a fated protagonist, and told in a distinct expressionistic style that underlined the dark theme of the material. It is, in fact, the first neo-noir (in my opinion), for it set the pattern and look for most of the neo-noirs that were to follow.

             Point Blank is an offbeat story of revenge set in both San Francisco and Los Angeles (mostly in L.A.). It’s violent, unpredictable, and revolutionary. Walker (no first name), the principal character, played by Lee Marvin, is shot and apparently killed in the first ten minutes of the film after a robbery scam on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. But he then turns up again a year later bent on obtaining the $93,000 owed him, and determined to wreak revenge on Mal Reese (John Vernon), the man who shot him, cheated him out of his cut, and ran off with his wife.

              The scene soon shifts to Los Angeles where Walker tracks down his wayward wife Lynn (Sharon Acker), and eventually Reese through the help of his wife’s sister Chris (Angie Dickinson). What follows is one frantic pursuit across L.A. from Santa Monica Beach to the L.A. River channel just south of downtown. This mad pursuit results in the suicide of his wife, Reese’s accidental death from a fall off his penthouse balcony, and the death of two of the syndicate heads who set up the original Alcatraz job. But oddly none of these deaths is caused by Walker directly. The movie ends where it begins on Alcatraz with Walker disappearing into the shadows of the deserted prison, never collecting his $93,000 cut.

              As in Kiss Me Deadly (1955) twelve years earlier, there’s an air of unreality in this movie that causes viewers to doubt what they’re seeing and hearing. Is it all a dream, is Walker a ghost, or is the entire film the fantasy of a dying man? Boorman leaves it up to the audience to decide.

              Like the Italian Antonioni, Boorman, an Englishman, was not fond of L.A. For him it signaled everything that was wrong with modern American society--- it was stark, over-sized, impersonal, alienating, and materialistic--- a perfect place for a vengeance- determined lone gun to operate freely. To emphasize this he chose location sites like the  empty antiseptic corridor of the L.A. Airport terminal for Walker’s arrival, the L.A. River channel between the Fourth and Sixth Street Bridges--- a huge ditch encased in concrete and lined with chain-link fences--- for a double assassination scene; the exterior of a sterile-looking glass and steel Wilshire Boulevard office building for Walker to prowl around in while doing his stalking; a super-sized Culver City car lot to highlight the materialistic superficiality of 1960’s America; and the grimy and deserted underbelly of the Santa Monica Freeway for a hair-raising white-knuckle demolition car ride. Even the more attractive locations like the Hollywood Hills home of Brewster (Carroll O’Connor), one of the syndicate heads, and the Huntley House Hotel in Santa Monica with its then futuristic outdoor elevator (still there, by the way) give the feeling of artificiality and vulgar wealth.

                What Boorman did with this movie to set the style for future neo-noirs is what makes Point Blank exceptional (other than Lee Marvin’s stunning performance). In the classic black and white noir movies of the past shades of lighting and use of shadows were used to set the mood of the story. This was no longer effective, or needed, in color movies. Boorman used color schemes to send the same messages. Different colors are highlighted in several key scenes: green in the syndicate office, orange at the Hollywood Hills house, white and blue in the car lot, and bright yellows and reds for Angie Dickinson’s dresses. It is definitely a beautiful movie to look at.

                In the classic noirs odd camera angles and distorted images were used to disorient the audience and create a feeling of unreality. Boorman uses a postmodern narrative style that jumps back and forth from past to present and seemingly out of place scenes like a bizarre nightclub episode with a screaming James Brown-like singer, a guileless clientele, and a semi-psychedelic fight scene for the same effect. These innovative techniques would become standard in the neo-noirs of Soderbergh, Mann, Lynch, and the others who have come since.

                  Point Blank was another film that was not well received by audiences in 1967, but has since become a cult classic, considered one of the “top films of the decade.” It has a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

              

Blade Runner (1982)

Director: Ridley Scott

Writers: Hampton Francher & David Peoples, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick.

Actors: Harrison Ford; Rutger Hauer; Sean Young; Edward James Olmos; Daryl Hannah; William Sanderson

Cinematography: Jordan Cronenweth

Music: Vangelis

Running time: 114 mins.

Rated: R

 Los Angeles, November 2019?

         Blade Runner is one of those movies that seems to be on most people’s most favorite list (91% on Rotten Tomatoes). When it was released in1982 it didn’t get a very positive response. The critics were cold to it, and the public couldn’t understand it. Why then is it now a classic? What is the appeal of this movie that has endured and grown over the last thirty-two years? 

          It’s a tech-noir, or future noir, or science-fiction noir--- the sub-genre  has several names. It wasn’t the first--- that honor goes to Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), but it was the best. It had the great fortune of having Ridley Scott (a “creator of worlds”) as its director and artistic conceiver, and what makes it appealing first of all is the look. There was never anything before that actually looked anything like Blade Runner.

           Most science-fiction movies that dealt with future time presented a world that was totally modern and far advanced from the present. But Blade Runner did something different: it gave us a retro-future --- a future that was both technologically advanced, but also one that harked back to a familiar past. The idea that the future could possibly look like the past was until then completely unknown--- at least in Hollywood.

            The movie also dealt with the theme of what constitutes humanity, memory, and just how artificial is artificial intelligence. The humanity of the characters, both human and replicant, stands out and causes viewers to think a little more deeply than they normally would watching a sci-fi movie.

            The Los Angeles that Scott presents to us is a dark misty mega-city of gas fires, pollution, and acid rain--- a city of the left behinds--- those who could not qualify or afford to settle in the off-world colonies. Like the classic films noir it borrows from, most of the movie takes place at night. This L.A. is a city where the police patrol in air sleds(aerodyne “spinners”) and almost everyone else travels on foot, by bus or on bicycle. In its blighted crowdedness it resembles 1980s Shanghai more than 2010s Los Angeles, but that’s what makes this conception so noteworthy. It’s a possible L.A. as seen from 1982.

              Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), the main character, is a blade runner, a cop who hunts down replicants, advanced androids who possess self-awareness and can pass as totally human. These replicants were developed to serve as labor in the off-world colonies and are banned from earth. When several of them make a murderous escape from the colonies and wind up somewhere in the crowded streets of L.A., Deckard is called on to retire (i.e kill) them. And this he does. We follow Deckard in his pursuits through these streets that lead to a final end for the replicants, and an awakening and self-realization for Deckard. The unexpected awakening comes to him during his investigation when he encounters and falls in love with Rachael (Sean Young), an advanced Nexus-6 replicant, who was created especially for Dr EldonTyrell (Joe Turkell), the head of Tyrell Corporation, the developer and maker of the androids. Rachael, who is unaware that she is a replicant until she hears Deckard and Tyrell talking, saves Deckard’s life when he’s attacked by one of the escapees. After this the two come to question the actual meaning of life, and what makes us human. Is it intelligence or love--- or both? The answer is left to the viewer.

             Although most of Blade Runner was shot on sound stages at Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank and in London, Scott used three iconic Los Angeles locations as exterior footage: Union Station, the Second Street tunnel, and especially the Bradbury Building on Broadway, which was used as the scene of the tense rooftop pursuit and finale of the film. The original novel by Phillip K. Dick takes place in San Francisco, but Scott set his version in Los Angeles because of its classic film noir associations. It was a good choice.

             The vision of Los Angeles in the second decade of the 21st century that Scott created may not be what has actually come about, but he was definitely prophetic about the multi-cultural makeup of the present-day city. Los Angeles in1980 was still a mostly white middle-American city, but In the last thirty years it has absorbed immigrants from every corner of the world, making it one of the most ethnically and racially diverse cities in the world. The multi-lingual conversations heard presently on the streets of downtown L.A., Hollywood, Westwood, or Van Nuys on any given day emphasize this change and recall the multi-lingual “Cityspeak” of Gaff (Edward James Olmos), Deckard’s cop associate, and the street people of Rick Deckard’s City of the Angels. 

A Better Life (2011)

Director: Chris Weitz

Writer: Eric Eason

Story by: Roger L. Simon

Actors: Demian Bichir: José Julián; Dolores Heredia; Carlos Linares; Bobby Soto

Cinematography: Javier Aguirresarobe

Music: Alexandre Desplat

Running time: 94 mins.

Rated: PG-13

L.A. and the immigrant

           America is a land of immigrants. All of us are, or are descended from, people who came here seeking a better life. Even the original Americans came here crossing the Bering Strait in search of game that was becoming scarce in the Old World of Asia. A better life is a human right. It drives us all, though we may call it by different names.

Today immigration is a politically charged term that has the tendency to polarize and alienate--- even infuriate. This movie puts a human face on the controversy and makes no political statements; it just gives a view of one man’s determination to better himself and ensure a better future for his son.

             Carlos Galindo (Demian Bichir) is an undocumented Mexican immigrant who came to Los Angeles with his wife fifteen years ago to escape the poverty and lack of opportunity in his homeland. He works as a gardener and has trouble making enough to support his teenage son Luis (José Julián); his wife, we learn later in the film, deserted them when their son was an infant. The relationship between Carlos and Luis is strained. Carlos lives only for his son; he even sleeps on the couch so that Luis can have the only bedroom in their small rented house. But Luis is ashamed of his father, and is being pressured to join a local gang. Carlos needs a truck so that he can work independently and develop his own business. The opportunity comes along when his boss Blasco (Joaquín Cosio) decides to give up the business and return to Mexico. Carlos gets a loan from his sister Anita (Delores Heredia) and buys his boss’s truck and gardening tools; but on his first day as an independent contractor his dayworker assistant Santiago (Carlos Linares) steals the truck, shattering Carlos’s hopes for a better future. 

                 The rest of the movie deals with Carlos and Luis traveling around Los Angeles in search of the stolen truck. The journey they take bonds the father and son, but ultimately leads sadly to their unwanted separation. 

                A Better Life is a realistic portrayal of Latino immigrant life in Los Angeles--- the best and the worst of it. It loosely resembles the storyline of the post-war neorealist Italian film The Bicycle Thief (1948). Locations are spread out across the county: East L.A., Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and South Central. The Chicano street dialect is spot on authentic--- no clichés here, this is the real thing. Father Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries (one of L.A.’s living saints) was a consultant on the language and culture.

                  This movie, as I said, is not a political or social statement; it’s a character study, and the characters of both Carlos and Luis are beautifully presented by Demian Bichir and José Julián. Bichir was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance  and Julián for a Spirit Award. Bichir’s facial expressions say more in a second than a multi-worded sentence--- hurt, joy, wonder, and anger: all expressed simply in the blinking of an eye and the tightening of the lips. 

                   Two scenes in particular really stand out and show the humanity of the man. In one, Carlos, on his first day of work as a new entrepreneur with his new truck, climbs a palm tree to trim it. From the height he looks out at the view and admires the city spread out before him--- his city. He’s on top of the world and he’s made it, there’s hope. But in a second as he looks down he sees his keys are missing and Santiago is driving away in his truck--- it’s all gone. He chases the truck until he’s exhausted. 

                   The other takes place in the detention center just before he’s about to be sent back to Mexico. On their journey to find the stolen truck the father and son had stopped at a Charro rodeo in East L.A. There Luis asked his father why he had had him, but Carlos could not express it at that time, and the question went unanswered. At their last meeting he gives Luis the moving answer--- an answer the boy needed to here.

                    A Better Life is just one story of one man’s dream to carve out a future and help build a nation in the process; there have been millions before him, and there will be millions in the years to come--- this is an immigrant’s tale.

             

Shampoo (1975)

Director: Hal Ashby

Producer: Warren Beatty

Writers: Robert Towne; Warren Beatty

Actors: Warren Beatty; Julie Christie; Goldie Hawn; Lee Grant; Jack Warden; Tony Bill

Music: Paul Simon

Cinematography: László Kovács

Running time: 110 mins.

Rated: R

Beverly Hills  60s excess--- seen from the 70s.

       Shampoo is a satire on the narcissistic culture prevalent in the upper classes in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. It was made in 1975, so there was a several year period of reflection between the time depicted and the writing of the screenplay. Robert Towne and Warren Beatty, the writers knew what they were writing about having had direct experience with the subject matter. Towne was, and still is, the consumate L.A. writer (he wrote the screenplay for Chinatown), and Beatty is an actor who lived the culture of 1960s Hollywood/Beverly Hills. Both are Hollywood liberals, so the critique here is sharply directed at the self-absorbed, materialistic, hedonistic moneyed class they were very familiar with. The politics is blatant.

       The story takes place during one twenty-four hour period--- Election Day, November 4,1968--- hence the politics. Beatty plays George Roundy, a Beverly Hills hairdresser, who is trying to open his own salon while managing his overactive, multi-partnered sex life at the same time. George’s unrelenting heterosexual sex drive is beginning to catch up with him. He’s having simultaneous affairs with several women--- two of them the wife, Felicia, and the mistress, Jackie, of Lester Karpf (Jack Warden), a Beverly Hills millionaire businessman who George is hoping will help finance his business venture. George is ambitious and thinks he using his conquests to further his own ends; but not being the brightest guy on the block, he doesn’t realize that he’s just being exploited by these bored, unsatisfied, frustrated rich women. He winds up getting dumped by all of them and finding himself alone on a hill above Mulholland Drive after Jackie (Julie Christie), the one he really cared for, goes off with the money (Lester). 

          The social comments in this film are strong--- and the political even more so. Lester, the rich Republican businessman and Nixon supporter, who claims to be concerned about the disintegration of the moral fiber of our society, drives around in a Rolls Royce listening to stock reports while his wife Felicia (Lee Grant) wiles away her time in beauty salons--- when she’s not having sex with George. Lester is unfaithful to his wife with a woman who is unfaithful to him; and his daughter Lorna (Carrie Fisher) plays tennis all day and solicits sex from men she barely knows (George again). He may be a shrewd businessman, but he’s not sharp enough to notice that he’s being cuckolded twice, or maybe thrice--- if you include his daughter. Everybody in this movie is either using someone, and/or being used by someone.

        There are two Election Night parties the principal characters attend that spotlight the political divide prevalent at the time in upper L.A. society (a divide that is still with us). One is an old-line, conservative Republican reception at the Bistro on Cañon Drive in Beverly Hills. The attendees are older well-heeled establishment types. Pictures of Nixon, Agnew and Reagan abound as the partygoers await the intended victory. The other is at a private residence in Benedict Canyon attended by hip, young and seemingly liberal types--- also well-heeled and loose. But here alcohol, drugs, and sex are the order as opposed to the stuffy, ridiculousness evident at the Bistro. Both worlds depicted here are out of touch with reality and the problems afflicting the country at that time.

           Nixon is the elephant in the room in Shampoo. He’s everywhere lurking in the background, just waiting to take over. The year 1968 was when the sharp, political and social divisions in this country became deadly evident. It witnessed the assassinations of King and Kennedy, the riots that followed, the Chicago Democratic Convention debacle, and a war that refused to end. The New Frontier and the Great Society were coming to an end. Nixon was elected on the day this movie takes place with the slogan “Bring us together”; and from the vantage point of 1975 when the movie was made, and knowing what was to come: five more years of war in Vietnam, Watergate, and the eventual resignations of both Nixon and Agnew, it was obvious that that did not happen.

Note: See my overviews of Model Shop and Zabriskie Point for two other views of that pivotal year 1968 in L.A. 

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Director: Robert Aldrich

Writer: A. I. Bezzerides

Based on: Kiss Me Deadly, a novel by Mickey Spillane

Actors: Ralph Meeker; Albert Dekker; Paul Stewart; Juano Hernandez; Cloris Leachman; Maxine Cooper; Gaby Rodgers

Cinematography: Ernest Laszlo

Music: Frank DeVol

Running Time: 106 mins.

L.A. Noir Apocalypse

             Kiss Me Deadly is a 1950s detective story; at least that’s what it appears to be--- it’s more. Robert Aldrich and A.I. Bezzerides took Mickey Spillane’s lurid pulp  private eye novel and made it into something else: a critique on the Cold War American political/social mindset of the 1950s. They took Spillane’s two-dimensional characters and his standard pulp fiction plot and gave them cosmic significance.

               The story deals with detective Mike Hammer’s (Ralph Meeker) quest across L.A. for a mysterious box containing something important that several people have died for. Greedy and unscrupulous Hammer thinks it might be “something big”, something valuable, but is totally unaware of what it really is---dangerous nuclear material capable of blowing L.A. and possibly the rest of the world to kingdom come. Hammer’s obsessive quest forms the matrix for Man’s obsessive journey to ultimate destruction. This movie more than any other 50s film, with the possible exception of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), best epitomizes the doomsday paranoia of the period.

                 Hammer’s quest begins when one night he picks up a woman hitchhiker (Cloris Leachman) on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. She tells him her name is Christina and that people are chasing her. Mike grudgingly offers to drop her off at the nearest bus stop, but they are intercepted by several gangster types who knock Mike out, torture and murder Christina, and leave him unconscious in his wrecked sports car.

                 Upon recovery and released from the hospital, Mike sets out, haunted by Christina’s memory and her last words to him “ remember me”, to track down the “something big” she died for--- or the “great whatsit” as his assistant/girlfriend, Velda (Maxine Cooper) calls it.

                  In the course of his odyssey through mid-1950s Los Angeles Hammer meets an assortment of characters: a wily boxing promoter, a nervous truck driver, a cagey morgue assistant, a philosophical furniture mover; sarcastic apartment managers; an opera enthusiast, gangsters, an extremely deadly femme fatale, and various other strange types. Some are helpful, but most, especially the gangsters and the police, try to discourage him from his pursuit; but pig-headed, avaricious Mike takes no heed. In the end he finds what he’s looking for, but the big payoff turns out to be a nuclear apocalypse. The movie ends with him and Velda fleeing into the Pacific Ocean as the Malibu beach house where they were being held by the mysterious and sinister Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker) and his gangster minions erupts in a nuclear reaction.

               For Aldrich and Bezzerides, political leftists, Spillane’s pulp novel Mike Hammer with his latent fascist inclinations symbolized what they felt was wrong with America at that time of political witch hunts and McCarthy hearings. Instead of Spillane’s hero figure this movie version of him is anything but heroic. Hammer is self-centered and narcissistic, as Christina so aptly tags him. He likes the good life: sharp sports cars, a comfortable art-bedecked apartment, and fancy up-to-date gadgets (e.g. a tape operated answering machine decades before they became available to the public)--- and he’s not particular how he gets it. He uses Velda shamefully, taking advantage of her affection for him by pimping her out to get dirt for his divorce clients. He roughs up old men, insults women, and enjoys inflicting pain. He symbolizes the pettiness of those of us with assumed superior egos. And he, like the rest of us, is too concerned with his own little world to realize what’s going on in the greater world around him. His pettiness in the end will bring down the curtain on us all.

              Kiss Me Deadly is a remarkable piece of filmmaking on several different levels. The utter unreality of the style is unique. Almost everything in the movie seems to be out of joint. The whole film has a dreamlike quality that causes the viewer to doubt what he’s seeing and hearing. Camera angles are off, dialogues seem unnatural, sequences appear to have incongruities and odd time lapses. The opening credits tell right off that this movie is not ordinary--- they’re reversed. They move from bottom to top, not in the expected order. The L.A. portrayed is a strange place located between reality and fantasy.

               This movie is a cautionary tale, and Aldrich and Bezzerides artfully use mythological and classical allusions throughout the film to express the eternal truths and cataclysmic  message they want to relate. Hammer’s investigation is nothing less than a trip into the underworld, and a journey through the labyrinth. Like Virgil’s Aeneas, he even picks up a “golden bough” (in the wheel of his car) upon his entrance, but foolishly discards it, thereby sealing his fate. The “great whatsit” is the fatal box containing the Medusa’s head and guarded by Cerberus the hound of hell. And Gabrielle (Gaby Rodgers), Soberin’s femme fatale associate and the woman who out of curiosity and lust opens the deadly box, is no other than Pandora herself bringing ultimate woe and destruction into the world. Who would have thought that a 1950s rather run of the mill film noir could be so ingeniously contrived?

                Besides its oddness and offbeat artistry, Kiss Me Deadly has one more very important element to offer the modern viewer: it’s a cinematic time capsule of a long-gone Los Angeles. Dwight Eisenhower was president, take-cover drills were a common occurrence in most schools, and in a couple of years backyard bomb shelters would be all the rage. L.A. was changing fast and Hammer’s quest gives us a last view of what was about to pass away. Hammer does most of his investigating on Bunker Hill--- the former Bunker Hill of decrepit Victorian mansions, rickety old hotels, decaying apartment buildings, and the original Angel’s Flight. His travels also take him from his up-scale apartment building (still there) in a then sparsely populated Westwood, to a gangster’s estate in Beverly Hills (Greystone Mansion), a black lounge in South Central, the Hollywood Athletic Club (still there), a gas station in Calabasas, and finally to a spectacular explosive ending in the surf in Malibu.

                  Kiss Me Deadly is a one of a kind movie. Once you see it your opinion of 1950s Hollywood filmmaking as formulaic and unimaginative will be forever altered.

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Producers: Paul Thomas Anderson, Daniel Lupi, Joanne Sellar

Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson

Actors: Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzman, Mary Lynn Rajskub

Cinematographer: Robert Elswit

Music: Jon Brion           

Rating: R

Running: 95 mins.

 Valley punch drunk comédie humaine

          Paul Thomas Anderson is a Valley Guy (Studio City) and most of his early movies take place there: Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and this one Punch-Drunk Love. For Anderson his native San Fernando Valley is a place just a bit off center--- near Hollywood, on the other side of Beverly Hills and Bel Air, but continents away in ambience and worldview. It’s a place inhabited by second-tier T.V. people, porno workers, want-a-be’s and has-beens. Anderson’s Valley is very removed from the middle-class suburban image once applied to this disconnected third of L.A. located over the hill. His characters are misfits of a sort--- people who just don’t seem to belong anywhere; they live in the Valley because it’s the Valley. The misfit protagonist of Punch-Drunk Love, Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) is just such a person.

        Barry is a small businessman who lives in Sherman Oaks and sells toilet plungers out of his warehouse in Chatsworth. He is a total neurotic, on the verge of a complete mental collapse owing to the fact of having been raised the only boy with seven deprecating sisters. He collects frequent flyer miles by buying large amounts of products he doesn't need (Healthy Choice pudding for instance)--- this in  spite of the fact he doesn't go anywhere and doesn't eat pudding. He has no social life, is nervous, quirky, and has uncontrolled fits of anger and crying. His sisters treat him as if he were an idiot and consider him a born loser. His rather incompetent co-workers seem mystified by him, and his foreman Lance (Luis Gúzman)--- a Latino named Lance!!--- appears to be his only friend.

          Things begin to turn around for Barry when he meets Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), a friend of one of his sisters. Lena saw Barry in a photo and was determined to meet him. She thought he looked interesting--- Lena is not your typical match-up. After a shaky start they hit it off.

          But then things get a bit rough. Just before Lena came into his life, Barry, to ease his loneliness and be able to talk to someone, in desperation called a phone sex line and wound up being extorted by the lowlife scammers on the other end. This turns out to be quite serious when the extortionists send four knuckle-brained thugs to collect whatever they can get out of him. 

          When Lena is slightly injured in a car accident caused by the extortion collectors, Barry, now totally in love, and superhumanly empowered, beats the hell out of the thugs, takes Lena to a hospital, and having previously found out the location of the scammers, heads for Provo, Utah, phone in hand, to confront the sex line “supervisor” Dean Trumbell (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a local mattress salesman. Barry and Dean have a heated shouting match ending in a stand-off when Dean realizes he’s dealing with a total nut job. Barry returns to L.A. and seeks out Lena to apologize for leaving her alone at the hospital. She hesitates at first, but then invites him into her apartment. The movie ends with Lena saying, “So, here we go,” as the two of them play a tune on a harmonium.

            This movie has a lot going for it. The structure is quirky, the casting is off-beat (Adam Sandler--- who would have known?) and the humor outrageous. The film is divided into several segments by unusual pastel colored interludes, and the discordant music score definitely fits the quirky mood. Anderson creates characters, who would be funny anywhere, but because this story takes place in the Valley, seem to touch a special nerve for Angelenos who happen to live there--- myself included. 

            What Valleyite cannot identify with Barry lost in the all-too typical labyrinthine halls of Lena’s apartment complex trying to find his way back to her. These gargantuan rabbit warrens dominate the south Valley, my own area of Studio City is full of them. And how about  the utter quiet desolation of the industrial zone of Chatsworth at dawn? Whoever has worked there at night, as I have, can testify what a sudden horrific street noise can do to your nerves. Eckhart Auto on Canoga Avenue, by the way, became world famous owing to its few seconds appearance in the movie. Other places and street names featured in the film also add a touch of reality to this very un-real love story: Barry and Lena’s first date is at the Petit Chateau in North Hollywood (a well-known Valley restaurant, and a favorite of the late Bob Hope), and Barry’s residence is on Moorpark Street, where all the thirty-somethings--- along with the forty-year old virgin--- live

            What Dickens in his novels did for his Victorian London and its lowlife, and Balzac his nineteenth century Paris and its bourgeois middle class, Anderson, in his movies, does for his twenty first century San Fernando Valley and its over-the hill inhabitants: he gives us a look at L.A.’s backyard and the human comedy that can be found there.

Targets (1968)

Director: Peter Bogdanovich

Producer: Roger Corman

Writers: Peter Bogdanovich, Samuell Fuller

Actors: Boris Karloff, Tim O’Kelly, Peter Bogdanovich

Cinematography: László Kovács

Music: Ronald Stein (The Terror)

Rated: R

Running time: 90 mins.

 Terror in the Valley--- Karloff comes to Reseda

       With Targets we have another entry from 1968.The sixties were a decade when America began to take a look at itself, and L.A. got a lot of attention that year. There are a couple more films from that period I intend to write about (e.g Point Blank, andThe Graduate), so stay tuned. This was Peter Bogdanovich’s first feature, and it was a good start.      

        The story is actually an artificial bonding of two different stories: one about an elderly, burnt-out horror actor, Byron Orlok, who wants to retire and return to his native England; the other about a maladjusted young man who cracks one day and begins shooting people at random on the freeway and at a drive-in theater. The bonding, although improbable, surprisingly works. Bogdanovich originally wrote the shooter story based on two then recent notorious incidents of random violence: the 1965 101 Freeway sniper and the Charles Witman (Texas tower) shooter case from 1966. He presented it to Roger Corman, who offered to produce it if Bogdanovich would write Boris Karloff, who owed Corman two days work, into the story. Thus:Targets came to be.

   

   

        This is how the story goes. It opens with footage of a scene from Corman’s The Terror with Boris Karloff and a young Jack Nicholson. When the scene ends and the lights are switched on, we see several people in a viewing room; one of them, Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff), announces that he wishes to retire and is not interested in doing a new film by young director, Sammy Michaels (Peter Bogdanovich). He also plans not to do a pre-scheduled publicity appearance at a Valley drive-in the next day. Michaels, along with Jenny (Nancy Hsueh), his girlfriend and Orlok’s secretary, try to persuade Byron to reconsider.

        Meanwhile right across the street (Sunset Boulevard) from where the movie people are meeting young Bobby Thompson is buying a rifle. Bobby is an apparently average, polite and outwardly happy guy, who with his wife, lives with his middle-class parents in the San Fernando Valley. Bobby’s family life resembles that of the Andersons on the 1950s T.V. show Father Knows Best. But underneath Bobby is a troubled young man with murderous thoughts.

      Sammy Michaels, after an evening visit to Byron’s apartment, finally persuades him at least  to make the publicity appearance at the drive-in in Reseda. Later that day, however, Bobby finally snaps and kills his wife, his mother, and a grocery delivery boy. After neatly tucking the bodies of his wife and mom in bed and moving the delivery boy out of the way, Bobby calmly cleans up, leaves a prominent note telling what he’s done and what he’s about to do, leaves the house, goes to an oil storage tank next to the 405 Freeway in Van Nuys and begins to shoot unsuspecting drivers.

      After killing the lone attendant at the storage facility, and as the police approach, Bobby, to elude them speeds down Sepulveda Boulevard and eventually turns into the Reseda Drive-In--- the same drive-in where Byron Orlok is expected to appear that evening.. He hides behind the screen, and soon after the start of the movie (again Corman’s The Terror) begins to pick off patrons seated in their cars. Some people start to panic and try to escape, but most are unaware that anything is amiss. Byron and Jenny soon arrive and when Byron realizes what’s going on he faces down the young killer, slaps him around, and forthwith deposits him in the hands of the police. That’s the bare bones of this low budget production.

        This movie is really a forgotten gem; if you can, try to see it. First of all it was one of Boris Karloff’s last appearances--- and one of his best; Karloff died a year later. Although he contributed only two days work to the movie, all the great lines are his: my favorite being, “What a lousy town this has become!” said to Jenny while glancing through the window of his limo at the myriad of car dealerships on Van Nuys Boulevard on his way to the drive-in. There is also a “morning after” comic encounter between him and Bogdanovich and some rich banter between him and Jenny, the secretary.

         For a quickly made movie the production quality is rather good.They shot the freeway scenes without any authorization or sound equipment--- the sound was added later. The scenes of people pulling into the drive-in and purchasing refreshments at the candy counter were all shot clandestinely a few days before the actual filming at the drive-in. Indoor scenes of the viewing room, Byron’s apartment, and Bobby’s home were done on the same set--- the furniture was changed and the walls were repainted.

          For me the principal plus this movie offers, beside Boris Karloff’s performance, is that it gives the viewer a good look at the San Fernando Valley as it was in 1967. The best Valley vistas since Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949). Bogdanovich takes you down some prominent Valley streets like Sherman Way, Sepulveda and Van Nuys Boulevards; and from Bobby’s vantage point on top of the oil storage tank there’s a nice view of the Sepulveda Basin with its dam clearly visible. The storage tank facility, by the way, is still there; and ironically just a block and half south of it on Sepulveda Boulevard there is now a Target department store! But most of all, it is great to see the Reseda Drive-In (long gone) in its heyday.

          Other rather interesting points to be found in this movie are the use of radio and television broadcasts as background in certain scenes. One in particular is when Bobby and his “ideal” family are watching television, you can clearly hear the voice of Joey Bishop (The Joey Bishop Show) speaking to the audience. The family are visible, but Bishop is not. Bogdanovich also uses, of course since it’s Bogdanovich, clips from an early Howard Hawks movie--- a movie I’ve never heard of--- Criminal Code (1931) that Boris Karloff was in.

         With Targets Bogdanovich does a good job of emphasizing the contrast between the movie horror put forth by the likes of Karloff and the real horrors of today’s society--- the apparently innocuous Bobby Thompsons who say grace at dinner and then go out and randomly slaughter innocent people. Who are the real monsters?