Targets

Screen Hole
Screenplay

Targets
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
USA 1968
BFI Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Minor spoilers.

I’ve been wanting to catch up to Targets for a great many years and then, bizarrely, two turn up on Blu Ray in the same year. I’ve plumped for the one put out by the British Film Institute (which a friend gave to me for Christmas) over the Criterion edition because I understand it’s a slightly better version than its US counterpart.

Targets is the great director Peter Bogdanovich’s debut feature, which he wrote with his then wife Polly Platt and also, uncredited, the late, great Sam Fuller. Bogdanovich was very much a protege of the ‘Roger Corman school of film-making’ and Corman let him make this one if he included 20 minutes of footage of Karloff from his own film, The Terror, 20 minutes of new Karloff footage and the rest of new non-Karloff footage. Karloff, riddled by ill health but working quite a bit at the end of his career, only had one more year to live himself, but he liked the script for this so much that he did three extra days unpaid, which allowed for him to be in the film's finale too (he was originally going to be killed off half way through the story). It’s often cited by many, not least by Karloff, as his last film but he did make another five before he died (although some of the Mexican ones that he did were not released until 1971).

You can see why Karloff liked this one. Not only is it a well written piece that has an atmosphere probably unlike a lot of what was being produced back in 1969, but he also gets to play a role somewhat similar to himself (although not in attitude, as Karloff loved making movies and was never out of work). He plays a version of himself here, though, Byron Orlok, who is very much a down on his heels, ageing horror icon who has had enough of the movies he’s been making (such as The Terror) and, after the film’s opening where he’s watching it in the screening room with the director (an extended role for Bogdanovich himself, who does really great as an actor in this, it has to be said), he announces his retirement and, indeed, a lot of the film concerns people trying to get him to not do that. He eventually gets persuaded into going to give a talk (where he’ll announce his retirement) at the drive-in premiere of the film on the following night.

Meanwhile, Tim O'Kelly plays a perfectly normal looking guy but... he’s a gun nutter. The old ‘right to bear arms’ rubbish which is still, unbelievably, in the American constitution enables this person to suddenly go off the deep end, in his own muffled way... he kills his wife, his mother and then goes on a killing spree. Ending up at the drive-in screening at which Orlock is going to talk to the crowd, picking off people in their cars by shooting through a hole in the screen. The two strands of the film slightly overlap at the start, where this character has Orlock in his sights when he is testing out a rifle he buys in a gun shop across the road from the film company... but the two strands go their separate ways, cross cutting until they come together at the end in a really wonderful scene where Karloff confronts the gunman near the end of the picture. I have to say, the ending didn’t go at all like I expected it to and... wow.

It’s a great film and a wonderful debut from the legendary director. Because of various similar shooting instances and massacres, not to mention assassinations, around the time of the film’s release, Paramount only released eight prints out into the wild and so it did very little box office at the time. All I can say is, I’m glad it’s being properly re-evaluated now because, well I’m a bit hit and miss with Bogdanovich myself but this one is definitely a solid hit for me.

I loved the slow pacing and the ‘unnecessary to the story’ details and footage, really reminding the audience nowadays of the sheer artistry of the American films back then, before directors in the US became obsessive about making every shot count towards a story beat. I also loved the muted colour palette in some scenes, juxtaposed to other settings of brighter tones when the two stories rub up against one another. For instance, a shot inside the sniper’s muted urban house with his family is suddenly cut against Karloff and his PA (played by the lovely Nancy Hsueh) in a restaurant where all the walls are brightly lit on jarring green and yellow, vertical stripes. The sound design is great too, doing that thing of dialling back or bleeding out and in when needed to highlight certain things, almost an expressionistic approach to the audio element.

Also, the film has no score, the only music being diegetic and the only actual ‘film score’ being heard in the sequences where The Terror is being screened... which is great because, in the fraught and suspenseful final act, when Karloff goes to confront O’Kelly, the score of that movie emphasises the on screen action of Targets nicely. A beautiful juxtaposition where the diegetic source stands in for the non-diegetic element which is missing.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about Targets other than, Karloff is absolutely sensational in this and it’s no wonder that, in a memorable monologue half way through the film, which he did in one take, the cast and crew started applauding him as soon as the director called “cut”. This is a film I will definitely be coming back to and the new BFI release has plenty of good looking extras for me to explore when I do. A sensational picture, not to be missed.