Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968)
By David Sterritt

One reason why movie critics love Targets is the proof it offered that American critics could do what the cinephiles of the French New Wave had already pulled off: start your career as a film critic and historian, then move into directing and screenwriting projects that take full advantage of what you've learned from writing about pictures you love. Peter Bogdanovich was the first American to manage this trick, and Targets - his first feature, and arguably the best he's ever made - manifests his immersion in cinema lore every bit as much as his criticism does. Better still, the movie traditions that Bogdanovich loves aren't tacked onto the main story like DVD extras or Brian De Palma's least successful in-jokes and homages. They're woven into the fabric of the narrative with an ingenuity that adds additional levels of meaning without slowing the picture's full-throttle momentum for an instant.

The story begins in a Hollywood screening room, where a small group of insiders are watching the climax of the movie they've just made - a Roger Corman-type horror yarn, with Jack Nicholson chasing Boris Karloff through a creaky old castle full of cobwebs, corpses, and creepiness. This introduces the film-reference side of Targets, since the movie-within-the-movie is The Terror, an American International Pictures quickie that Corman directed (with uncredited help from Francis Ford Coppola and others) immediately after The Raven on an astonishingly tight schedule in 1963. Even more to the point, The Terror played a key role in allowing Bogdanovich to make Targets, since Karloff still owed Corman a few days of work, and Corman agreed to greenlight a Bogdanovich production if the first-time director would give Karloff a significant part. Knowing that he'd have limited use of Karloff's talent, Bogdanovich cleverly designed a narrative (with Polly Platt, who receives co-credit for the story) that could be filmed in separate stages, one featuring the Karloff plotline and another focusing on a second protagonist.

When the screening is over, the lights come on and we meet two of our main characters. One is Sammy Michaels, the (fictional) writer and director of the movie-within-the-movie, played by Bogdanovich, the (real-life) writer and director of Targets itself. The other is Byron Orlok, the (fictional) star of the movie-within-the-movie, played by Karloff, the (real-life) star of both The Terror and Targets itself. We quickly learn that something important is on Orlok's mind: He's decided to retire, even though this will end his long career and hurt his friend Sammy by ruining the prospects for Sammy's next project, a contemporary drama he's written for Orlok to star in. Everyone is upset by Orlok's decision, but he doesn't waver. The only concession he finally makes is to go through with an in-person appearance at a local drive-in theater, which he agreed to before anyone knew it would mark his farewell to the film business. Back at the hotel where he's staying in Los Angeles, he has a healthy number of good stiff drinks while pacifying his secretary and trying to soothe Sammy, who pays a drunken and argumentative visit in hopes of changing Orlok's mind.

By this time we've also met the movie's other main character. Bobby Thompson, neatly played by Tim O'Kelly, is a clean-cut Californian who lives with his pretty wife and respectable parents in a neat suburban home. The first time we see him is in a gun shop, where he's checking a rifle's telescopic sight by leveling the crosshairs on Orlok, who happens to be standing across the street. After completing his purchase, Bobby opens the trunk of his car to stow the new gun away, and we observe with a shudder that this is just the latest addition to a hefty arsenal he's already laid by. At home with his family, he's well behaved and upright to a fault, saying "Amen" after grace, calling his father "Sir," and all the rest. But these are people who don't examine life too closely, and when Bobby confesses to his wife that he has. well, troubling thoughts from time to time, she says she's late for work and scurries off. Little does she know how troubling those thoughts have become.

For most of its eighty-nine-minute running time, Targets cuts between these two storylines, as Orlok moves closer to his last public appearance and Bobby moves closer to some kind of breaking point. Bobby's big moment comes first. The following day he greets his wife and mother by shooting them dead. Then he drives to a nearby oil refinery, lugs a bagful of pistols and rifles to the top, kills a worker who comes to investigate the ruckus, and starts sniping at speeding cars on the freeway as if they were plastic ducks in a carnival shooting gallery. Fleeing the cops who eventually arrive, he races back to his car, pushes the pedal to the metal, and zips into an excellent hiding place he finds - namely, a drive-in theater that's just opened up for early arrivals.

And you guessed it, this is the very same drive-in where Orlok is slated to appear that night. Not knowing or caring about this, Bobby finds a parking place, climbs onto the scaffolding behind the screen, finds a peephole with a good view of the cars pouring in as dusk approaches, and recommences shooting at the unprotected vehicles and their unsuspecting inhabitants. This is among the eeriest scenes of violence ever filmed, and also one of the most piquant commentaries on both California car culture and American moviegoing habits. As the killing spree goes on and on, Bobby's sitting ducks gaze obliviously at the silver screen that conceals him, making out and munching popcorn in their isolated automobiles as if life's only terrors were make-believe ones concocted for nothing more serious than our momentary amusement. By escaping into Hollywood fantasies - even "scary" ones like The Terror, which the drive-in crowd is watching - today's conformists and consumers have managed to escape from a meaningful awareness of what their lives and their society are all about. Making this message all the more remarkable is Bogdanovich's success in conveying it via the same kind of entertainment fare he's implicitly disparaging, up to and including his use of The Terror as a prime specimen of this dismaying breed.

It's impossible to discuss to the climax of Targets without a spoiler or two, so consider yourself cautioned. The drive-in moviegoers eventually realize that something ghastly is going on. Cries of "Someone's shooting!" and "There's a sniper here!" start moving from car to car, and before long a walloping traffic jam develops as too many drivers cram their vehicles into the narrow exit driveways. Soon word of the panic gets to the limousine where Orlok is waiting for his moment in the spotlight, and elderly as he is, he decides to take action, walking toward the screen just as Bobby climbs down from his hidden perch to retrieve some weaponry he's dropped. Coming into the light, the psychotic sniper faces an awe-inspiring sight: Byron Orlok, the very embodiment of horror, is striding toward him from both the left and right, in flesh-and-blood on the pavement and in living color on the screen. Trapped between these twin terrors in a nightmare come true, Bobby collapses in quivering fear like the regressive psychopath he is. And now Orlok utters a key line of the film, revealing in a few simple words the motivation for his courageous action, the real reason for his retirement from horror films, and his sudden realization - sparked by the sight of how puny and pathetic his adversary turns out to be - that those films aren't really as pernicious as he's come to imagine. "Is that what I was afraid of?" he rhetorically asks after slapping the psycho around. Horror movies may be self-fulfilling symptoms of a culture gone astray, but to react too strongly against them is to give them a power they neither need nor deserve.

Although its ideas remain as socially and culturally relevant as they were in 1968, Targets is intimately tied to the period that produced it. The character of Bobby is plainly modeled on Charles Whitman, a mentally ill young man who'd killed his wife and mother before sniping at cars from an observation tower at the University of Texas in Austin two years earlier, giving Americans an early (and largely unheeded) warning about an escalating gun fetishism across the land. In an ominous coincidence, moreover, the film's release on 15 August 1968 came in the immediate wake of two political assassinations - of Martin Luther King Jr. in April and Robert F. Kennedy two months later - that had renewed the sense of dread provoked by John F. Kennedy's murder late in 1963. And the film indirectly hints that Bobby is a Vietnam veteran who learned his killing skills in the Southeast Asian killing fields. Considered in these contexts, Targets is all the more chilling; and considered in the additional context of events like the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings, it's almost too prescient for comfort.

Returning to the film's cinematic merits, its style has more quiet sophistication than you'd expect from a filmmaker with far more experience than Bogdanovich had. During the scenes centering on Bobby, the camera often moves in his tracks as if it were a stalker with motives as sinister as his. The scenes revolving around Orlok have a different look, less sneaky and more straightforward. Even the movie's humor plays subtly into the themes it's exploring. After their hotel-room spat, Sammy and Orlok fall drunkenly into Orlok's bed, and when Sammy awakens in the morning, he gives a sudden start of alarm; when Orlok asks what jolted him, he says it was a shock to open his eyes and find Byron Orlok right next to him! Leaving the room a moment later, Orlok walks past a mirror, catches a glimpse of himself, and has a momentary jolt of his own. The superstar of horror is so scary that he even frightens himself! No wonder he's reassessing the foundations on which he's built his long career. (It's also worth noting a novel interpretation of Targets that says the whole movie after this scene is an enactment of Sammy's unproduced script, which Sammy has described as contemporary drama in which Orlok would show a whole new side of himself; substitute Peter for Sammy and Karloff for Orlok, and entertain the possibility that Orlok now stands in for Sammy's father, who's never seen or mentioned again..)

The movie references in Targets are also fascinating if you have sharp enough eyes to spot them. You can't help noticing the clip from Howard Hawks's classic 1931 classic The Criminal Code, reverently watched by impatient Orlok and boozed-up Sammy just before their quarrel in Orlok's living room; it's truly poignant to see Karloff at eighty-one years old viewing himself at half that age in a time-worn print on a tiny TV screen. Also unmistakable is the resemblance between Bobby's position on the refinery tank and the last stand of Cody Jarrett, indelibly played by James Cagney, at the climax of White Heat, the Raoul Walsh masterpiece of 1949. Bogdanovich's treatment is far cooler and crisper than Walsh's, however, evoking the detachment from reality of the radically depersonalized killer.

I'll leave readers to find more movie references on their own, but I want to close by saluting the moment in Targets that most movingly sums up Bogdanovich's reverence for the living history of film. It comes when Orlok is conferring with Sammy on how to prevent his drive-in appearance from becoming just another snoozefest with a near-decrepit actor who's all but irrelevant to the younger generation. Sammy suggests that Orlok tell a story, and Orlok likes the idea so much that he rehearses one from memory there and then: "An Appointment in Samarra," the W. Somerset Maugham about a long-ago servant who fears that Death is coming for him in Bagdad, flees to distant Samarra for safety, not knowing that Death's rendezvous with him has been slated for Samarra all along. The tale is a microcosm of Targets as a whole, which begins with Bobby sighting Orlok through his crosshairs and ends with their fateful confrontation in a very different place. But more important, the story of Targets stops in its tracks during this scene, allowing Karloff to recite the grim fable with all the artistry he's acquired over a lifetime of dedicated creative work; it's clearly a moment of tribute by a filmmaker who, out of profound respect for the actor and all he represents, records the recitation as both a sign of personal affection and a cinematic time capsule for ages to come.

Bogdanovich acted not a moment too soon. Although it doesn't show on screen, Karloff was very sick with emphysema when Targets went before the camera - he rested in a wheelchair between takes, breathing oxygen from a tank - and this was the last feature he completed before his death the following year. Bogdanovich went on to a long and checkered career, but he never outdid his debut picture for originality or inspiration. And a key factor in its brilliance is the heartfelt participation of an elderly icon who'd soon be keeping his own appointment in Samarra all too soon.

David Sterritt
© FIPRESCI 2010

From the book The B List, edited by David Sterritt and John Anderson. Excerpted by arrangement with Da Capo Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2008. Read more about The B List or buy it here.

top