The Fractured Mirror 2.0 Targets (1968)

Here at Fractured Mirror, we have explored a curious subsection of movies about movies that are at least partially made up of footage from earlier movies. Rodney Dangerfield’s oddball film debut The Projectionist was such a movie but the king of movies about movies that are made up of bits and pieces of earlier cinematic endeavors is undoubtedly Roger Corman. The prolific producer, director and studio head is nearly as legendary for his penny-pinching ways as he is for the remarkable stable of future cinematic greats who learned to make films and cut corners working for the independent film king early in their careers.

Before he gave the world Gremlins, Gremlins 2: The New Batch and previous Fractured Mirror entry Matinee, a prodigiously gifted young editor named Joe Dante began his directorial career co-directing the randy and inspired 1976 movie world spoof Hollywood Boulevard with Allan Arkush for Corman’s fiendishly cost-efficient company.

As a way of slashing costs while increasing production values, much of Hollywood Boulevard was taken from earlier Corman epics. It was a strategy that had worked for Corman before, both commercially and creatively.

In the late 1960s, for example, Corman famously allowed an ambitious, movie-loving egghead named Peter Bogdanovich an opportunity to realize his creative vision and ambitions by directing his own film as long as he made sure to include clips from an earlier movie.

The movie in question was The Terror, a gothic, atmospheric old-time fright flick vehicle for Boris Karloff co-starring Jack Nicholson, who would help change film history a year later as the soul of Easy Rider, and Corman repertory player Dick Miller, who perhaps not so coincidentally delivers one of his funniest and most beloved performances as a sleazy agent in Hollywood Boulevard.

As with Hollywood Boulevard, Bogdanovich pragmatically decided that the easiest and most natural way to incorporate archival footage from the Corman library into a new movie would be to make the new/old movie show-business and movie themed.

In the case of Bogdanovich’s 1968 masterpiece Targets, that meant casting Boris Karloff as Byron Orlok, a professional bogeyman and horror icon like the actor playing him who shares at least two credits with Karloff: The Terror, a snippet of which opens the film and which plays at a bloody drive-in movie theater during the film’s climax and 1931’s The Criminal Code, a pre-Hays Code shocker directed by Howard Hawks that features Karloff in an important early performance.

For the key role of Sammy Michaels, hotshot filmmaker, lady’s man and an inveterate cinephile, as well as Byron’s director, friend and champion, Bogdanovich lucked out in casting an actor I’m sure he considered the smartest, most charming and handsome in the business: himself. He even gave himself a drunk scene and a gorgeous love interest in Byron’s secretary Jenny (Nancy Hsueh), whose Asian heritage is constantly referenced, and not in ways we would today consider culturally sensitive.

Targets is only partially about a melancholy giant of the horror film world staring down professional obsolescence and his own mortality after announcing his retirement from film, much to the chagrin of the folks hoping to work with him on his next movie.

The other half of the film follows Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), a fresh-faced, apple-cheeked Vietnam war veteran and clean cut boy next door type as he eats candy, goes shooting targets with his father and methodically prepares for a massacre that will take the lives of both his family and a series of luckless strangers when he takes his shooting spree first to a busy highway and finally to a Reseda Drive-In movie theater where Byron is wearily, grumpily and grudgingly making his final public appearance before returning home to England.

The movie’s spree killer is like Happy Days’ Richie Cunningham with a body count.

Targets sets the Sociopathic Killer Next Door and a dignified old man exhausted by a lifetime of embodying people’s worst nightmares on a collision course then watches, with alternating currents of chilly sociological distance and deep empathy, as the distressingly “normal” killer pursues a bleak endgame he may not survive.

Targets is about the curious rituals and codes of show business folks, a group that includes Orloff’s “people” and a jackass, hip-talking radio DJ who will introduce Orloff at the drive-in even though his very existence offends the elderly actor, and everyday Americans going through their daily rituals of work, television, driving and sleep, an orderly existence interrupted far too frequently by shocking outbursts of gun violence.

You do not need to be a film historian to guess which tribe Bogdanovich belongs to. Accordingly, the sequences involving Orloff, Sammy and Jenny have a decidedly different tone than the Bobby scenes. That’s appropriate, since movie people like Sammy are clever and verbose for a living. For movie folk like Sammy and Orloff, conversation is competition. It’s seduction. It’s vamping. For quiet types like Bobby, words are useful only for getting mom to pass the salt and telling the bored man at the gun shop how many boxes of ammunition you’ll be needing.

Targets is at once a haunting and surprisingly moving character study about a living anachronism, a dryly funny gentleman trying to end his career with dignity and self-respect in an industry without much use for either quality, and a distressingly timely exploration of how the normalization of gun violence and gun culture makes killing sprees like the one depicted in the movie not just possible but inevitable.

The genius of O’Kelly’s performance - and it is, in its own quiet, unassuming way, a masterful turn - lies in its artlessness. O’Kelly never seems to be acting. There’s no artifice, no pretension, no acting school narcissism on display. O’Kelly doesn’t seem to be playing a character; he seems to be living life onscreen, in the moment.

In that respect, the film benefits from the lack of baggage the young actor brings to the role just as much as it benefits from the history Karloff brought to the role of Orloff, at least some of which we get to see onscreen in the clips from The Terror and The Criminal Code.

Since O’Kelly was essentially an unknown when the film was made, and would never go on to play another major role in film, there’s nothing in our imaginations that might separate the spookily committed yet heroically understated actor from the unforgettable role that he’s playing, no other famous roles or performances to compete with the indelible impression he makes here.

O’Kelly is terrifying in his normalcy. From the very start something is hopelessly off about him that’s so much more frightening for being a vague blankness, a spooky emptiness rather than the hammy telegraphing of mental illness and violence we expect from actors playing mass murderers.

Targets explores melodramatic subject matter in a cold, methodical, dispassionate way that makes everything scarier. It’s a horror film for a new era, an era where the things that kept people up at night were mental illness and gun violence and war and massacres, not hammy old men in make up pretending to be monsters or things that go bump in the night.

With Targets, Bogdanovich split the difference between New Hollywood and Old Hollywood, using the thematic freedom and social consciousness of the age to give one of his classic Hollywood heroes one last great role. Onscreen and off, Targets established Bogdanovich as a brash young man with a very old brain who is never more comfortable than when seated alongside one of the ancient greats of the business.

Bogdanovich’s famous predilection for name-dropping, narcissism and attaching himself to the giants of cinema can be annoying but there’s something beautiful about the way he wants the world to love and appreciate his heroes with a passion and intensity that rivals his own. 

Targets is perhaps the purest and most powerful expression of that admirable instinct. Bogdanovich wanted the world to admire Karloff as an actor and a man and not just a has been who played a famous monster of film land long ago, so he gave him a role worthy of his extraordinary talent, dry wit and magnetic presence. It was a fan’s act of devotion as much as it was a brilliant artistic choice that helped launch one of the most impressive, mercurial and melodramatic careers of the 1970s.

“You can’t change a lifetime with one picture” broods Karloff’s world-weary thespian at one point in Targets. That may be true, but a revelatory picture like Targets can, and did, change the way people saw Karloff and his entire career in a wholly positive way. A little over a half century later, Targets is nearly as important a part of Karloff’s legacy as Frankenstein was. Frankenstein is a cherished part of film history but Targets feels both like a product of its time and an eternally contemporary shocker ripped from not only today’s headlines but also tomorrow’s.

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