Quick notes: Targets (1968)

“All the good movies have been made.” “The world belongs to the young.” 

A couple of nice meta-scenes between the 80-year-old Boris Karloff and the young Peter Bogdanovich in Bogdanovich’s directorial debut Targets – with Karloff playing a version of himself, a former horror-movie star made weary by the state of the modern and by his own obsolescence; and PB trying to persuade him to do a new film.

Targets is a very strange film (as my friend Satish pointed out after we watched it together in my screening room), and not fully realised in some ways; but it is strange in a good way as far as I’m concerned. In the same sense as many of the nascent films made by that generation of American directors around the same time were (De Palma’s Greetings and Hi Mom! among them). Raw, experimental, cross-cutting between old and new forms of expression - all this during a pivotal transitional period for American cinema where young filmmakers who were movie geeks were simultaneously paying homage to their heroes and trying to push the boundaries of what could be shown onscreen. One moment Targets is paying affectionate tribute to Howard Hawks by showing a scene from The Criminal Code, the next minute there is a guerrilla-style, almost documentary-like sequence built around a sniper targeting vehicles.

Also here: the young Jack Nicholson in the film-within-the-film… a few scenes from Roger Corman’s The Terror.