Blu-ray Review: Peter Bogdanovich’s Crime Thriller Targets on the Criterion Collection

Despite it’s very au courant subject matter, Peter Bogdanovich’s first feature was never going to abide by the filmmaking trends of its era. In fact, it would be hard to think of many others in the industry less interested in the then-contemporary vanguard, and more fixated on the way things used to be back in American cinema’s golden age. Nevertheless, Targets emerged in 1968 as something of a bridge between the two generational factions that were in the early stages of splitting Hollywood apart.

Targets is essentially two films in conflict with each other right up to the final minute. Its logline is a ripped-from-the-headlines depiction of what, at the time, was a reasonably unheard-of phenomenon: a mass shooting. Lifting thematic elements of the infamous case of Charles Whitman, who climbed to an observation deck at the University of Texas in Austin, on August 1, 1966, and picked people off with a rifle, the film circles almost dispassionately around Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), a clean-cut family man and veteran who devours Babe Ruth bars and collects firearms with equal gusto.

Bogdanovich’s depiction of his march toward carnage is both all clues and somehow no clues, putting the audience inside the to-be killer’s mindset via POV shots through his various sniper scopes, only to reveal to viewers the true horror that there is, ultimately, nothing to learn from being on the inside, no motive whatsoever. The inevitable suggestion is that Bobby’s eventual massacre is thereby, at least implicitly, the product of his environment as much as his psyche.

But housed within that exploitation-friendly film is a surprisingly tender portrait of one of Hollywood’s old souls, horror legend Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff, playing a very thinly veiled version of himself), contemplating the end of his career. First seen in a screening room mordantly watching the shambles of what he knows, but hasn’t yet announced, will be his final picture, Byron knows that the time has come to pass the spiritual baton.

His effective-immediately retirement throws ascendant writer-director Sammy Michaels (Bogdanovich himself) a curveball, as he’s written a script just for him. In a drunken hotel room heart-to-heart (one sparked by a TV airing of Howard Hawks’s The Criminal Code), Sammy pleads with Byron to reconsider. Byron points to a nearby newspaper, where a recent mass shooting sits above the fold. “My kind of horror isn’t a horror anymore,” Byron argues. “You know what they call my films today? Camp, high camp.”

Even in style, Bodganovich keeps the film’s two storylines distinct from one another. His scenes with Byron are stately and elegant (at one point the camera spends well over a minute gently tracking into Karloff as he tells an old-fashioned ghost story), whereas his depiction of the first stage of Bobby’s massacre, carried out at a nearby highway, is clinical, almost documentarian.

At first linked only by the fact that, while buying his umpteenth gun, Bobby happens to catch Byron in his sights while the latter is exiting the screening room, Targets sets up both story threads to collide at the Reseda Drive-In (drive-ins themselves being avatars of movie magic past their prime). Convinced to give an appearance there following a twilight screening of The Terror, Byron unwittingly sets up his swan song to be upstaged by a real-life terror.

When hell breaks loose and Bobby, evading police capture after the highway shootings, starts firing moviegoers from a hole in the screen, it’s an actualization of Byron’s own earlier observations about the futility of his genre hoping to retain any relevance. And yet, when Byron finally catches sight of the cowering sniper and, in a moment of (yes) high camp, disarms him with his cane, he muses, “Is that what I was afraid of?” It would stand to reason that Bogdanivich, in his debut feature and against the inevitable onset of New Hollywood’s movie brats, would have already taken such a clear and unambiguous side with the old guard.

Image/Sound

Being a Roger Corman production, Targets wasn’t an expensive movie. According to producer Polly Platt, it only cost the 1968 equivalent of $1 million, and, in fact, the only reason that it was green-lit at all was to recoup a few days’ work out of Boris Karloff from his prior film with Corman. And yet, in Criterion’s new 4K transfer from the original camera negative, it looks like, well, a million bucks. Colors are definitely on the muted side, which is undoubtedly a function of the budget, but the crucial curtains of darkness in the film’s drive-in finale are ominous and enveloping. This does appear to be one of the Criterion transfers that leans a little bit to the yellowish side, though that, too, could be more a reflection of the original film stock. The monaural sound is fine, though one notes that Karloff’s intonations at time seem a little muddy, at least compared to the punchiness of the film’s many gunshots and ricochets.

Extras

First and foremost, you always get plenty of bang for your buck when Peter Bogdanovich is on a commentary track, so it’s great news for fans that Criterion ported over his track from the early-aughts DVD release of the film. His chatter includes any number of stories from both the making of the film and the world of cinema at large, from the actual source of the prolonged story that Karloff’s character delivers in that single shot (and the fact that it was actually a one-take miracle, which was greeted with applause from the crew) to his collaboration with then-wife and cinephile hero-of-late Polly Platt. He also admits that his two least favorite genres are horror and sci-fi, “So of course my first picture is a horror picture.”

Bogdanovich’s track is bolstered by the companion interview from the same prior DVD, which packs as much as it can into less than 15 minutes. In contrast, director Richard Linklater gets a lot more time to give some perspective on the film in our current mass shooting-plagued era, but he also takes time to muse that there may have never been a director more set up to succeed than Bogdanovich. Platt also gets some time, in a half-hour clip taken from a 1983 interview and Q&A. Platt speaks to the impact the Austin shooting event had on the creation of the script, and talks about Sam Fuller’s not-so-small role in getting that script into shape. (She also tells the story of how Fuller told them to hold back as much of the budget as they could so as to splurge on the drive-in finale.) Finally, critic Adam Nayman contributes a perceptive essay to the accompanying booklet, which also reprints a 1969 interview with Bogdanovich in which he really delves into the details of his deal with Corman that allowed the film to be made.

Overall

Far from a period piece, Targets’s contrasting tales—one a dignified out-with-the-old, the other an appalled in-with-the-new—capture a still-relevant portrait of America’s uniquely schizophrenic relationship with gun violence.