Medium Cool
Directed by Haxell Wexler
Written by Haxell Wexler
1969/US
IMDb link
First viewing/Netflix rental
[asked in 1969 if he could see himself making a film in exile because of his social and political views] I’m proud to say I get regular visits from the FBI, but I’ll never become an exile. I think this is a great country. That’s precisely why I feel I have an obligation to keep examining the freedoms that are rightfully ours. We all have that obligation–to see that they don’t get away from us. — Haxell Wexler
The perfect old movie for these times. Things weren’t all that different in 1968 than they are now, sad to say.
The film was shot on location before and during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. John Casselles (Robert Forster) is an apolitical and ambitious photojournalist eager to be in the middle of things. He has a beautiful blonde girlfriend with whom he frolics. He covers such 1968 events as the Robert Kennedy Assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. Assassination, and riots in the lead-up to the Convention.
John kind of drops the girlfriend after he meets Eileen (Verna Bloom), a young widowed mother from rural West Virginia who is now living in Chicago with her strong-willed 13-year-old son. John finds himself drawn closer into the violence and political uproar outside the Convention Hall. In the meantime, Eileen’s son goes missing and she spends the remainder of the film searching for him through the crowds and confusion of protestors and heavily armed National Guardsmen.
I thought this was very interesting as a time capsule though perhaps not so riveting as a film. Wexler is a much better cinematographer than he is a director or writer. The film looks beautiful but the plot seems somehow contrived. Some of the acting by the unknown cast is a a little stilted. Wexler wears his political heart on his sleeve and this is a film that takes sides.
Is there anything that looks sillier in 2020 than a hippie? I identified at the time but now they look kind of ridiculous. The film has a timely score by Mike Bloomfield with some incidental music by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.
