Word: bogdanovich
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...PETER BOGDANOVICH'S Targets, a low-budget oddity of considerable merit, snuck into Boston last week on the bottom half of an exploitation bill at the Center. Paramount, the distributor, doesn't know how to handle the film--a realistic shocker about an All-American boy-turned-sniper on the rampage--and despite good reviews and box office on its initial theatrical engagements, they stuck a plea for gun control arbitrarily before the credits, then decided not to open the film at all. In the depths of his soul, film critic Bogdanovich probably doesn't care. After all, many films...
...Bogdanovich picks good models and adds good ideas to his petty thievery. Bobby Thompson's execution of his wife and mother superbly blends diverse gimmicks (stop motion shots, wide angle distortion) into a well-conceived unity. A close moving shot along the floor after the corpses are removed reveals some loose change which fell out of the mother's house coat as she died--truly a good touch, as is Bobby's compulsive neatness: a bit of calculated direction about which I would be more sanguine were Bogdanovich's own camera style less neat and precise. These are better than...
ANDREW SARRIS correctly analyzed Bogdanovich's inability to mix cinema of contemplation with that of tight Hawksian storytelling. His camera is constantly pulling away from the action to examine the locations or pause on details. Consequently Bogdanovich gives us more visual information than we need to enjoy a crisp narrative, or (take your pick) too much narrative to enjoy a reflective stylistic bent normally associated with Mizoguchi or Rossellini. It is hard to determine what director has influenced Bogdanovich, but the outcome exists largely in terms of meaningless tracking shots which bear down on their subjects. In any case, Targets...
...excerpted film makes its showcase suffer by comparison. It happens even to good films. Vivian Kurz in Andrew Meyer's Match Girl watches a chunk of Vertigo on TV, and a sensible spectator gets irritated when Meyer decides to return to his own film. The same holds for Peter Bogdanovich's Targets: even the glimpse of Hawks' The Criminal Code Bogdanovich shows us is enough to persuade that it has Targets beat by a mile...
Targets does make one sorry improvement on life, however. Bobby kills far more bystanders than Whitman did. The endlessly repetitive fusillades suggest that Writer-Director Peter Bogdanovich, in his first film, was really intent on creating the most prolific murderer in Hollywood's long history of violence. Unfortunately, it is a record made to be broken...