Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...stupidity of Targets' distribution has received a lot of press coverage over the last few months, undeservedly I think, since the film itself is every bit as perversely eclectic as its marketing. The camera pulls back to a full shot of a family dinner, and Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life is recreated; Karloff's monologue recalls Welles' in Mr. Arkadin as surely as we recognize Strangers On A Train when the sniper's ammunition falls just out of reach (shades of Bruno and the cigarette lighter...
Finally, on the debit side, the film's construction depends overmuch on cross-cutting between Bobby and scenes of Byron Orlock, an aging actor determined to retire, beautifully played by Boris Karloff. We learn early that there is going to be a confrontation of the two at a drive-in, and tend to want to get it over with once the set-up has been established. To some extent, this is suspense generated slickly by Bogdanovich, but mostly it's irritation at having to wade through tentative cross-cutting toward a climax...
...Targets has one hell of a pay-off, and adding it to the film's generally successful calculation, Bogdanovich comes out pretty clean considering this is his first movie. Midway through he begins to set up a contrast between the horror of reality represented by the sniper and the melodrama horror of movie reality represented by Orlock. At the end, Orlock takes Bobby, knocking a gun out of his hand with a cane, asserting a potency he had thought nonexistent. Although ambiguous, the effect is one of total release: we are still in a movie, and in the movies...
...former home of Doctor Doolittle and Gone With The Wind looking and smelling a little like the bowels of the Indoor Athletic Building. I'm not really qualified to tell you whether Inga makes Therese and Isabel look like a milk-fed puppy, not having seen the former film or The Fox; the ads claim that the screen begins to steam, a verb best reserved for about 20 per cent of the audience, but I guess in all fairness a bubble does rise to the surface now and again...