Noirvember: Targets (1968)

In August of 1966 Charles Whitman, after stabbing his wife and mother to death, climbed a clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin and shot over 30 people with a rifle.

Two years later Peter Bogdanovich directed his first movie. Famed producer Roger Corman told Bogdanovich he could make any movie he liked under two conditions. First Boris Karloff owed him two days worth of work so the film would have to utilize that. Second, he had to use clips from Corman’s own film with Karloff, The Terror (1963). Other than that he could do what he wanted (within the budget constraints of course.)

Targets blends a slightly autobiographical tale of Karloff as an aging horror actor who finds real life’s horrors to be more than he can take, and a Charles Whitman-esque “average man” who goes on a shooting spree. The way that these two separate stories merge is quite fascinating.

Karloff is Byron Orlok an elderly actor who starred in the type of horror movies Karloff used to star in. But he finds he no longer has an audience. Those old films seem dated and cheesy to modern audiences. Real life with its relentless real violence is much scarier than those old movies. He announces he’s going to retire, much to the chagrin of Sammy Michaels (Peter Bogdanovich) a director who has just written a part specifically for Orlok.

During these scenes, we watch Orlok watch scenes from The Terror, and later we’ll see him watch himself in The Criminal Code (1933). It is quite a treat to watch Karloff watching himself on screen.

Orlok is unrelenting in his decision to retire but does agree to make an appearance at a drive-in theater where one of his films will be shown.

Meanwhile, Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly) is a seemingly normal young man. He has a pretty wife and a perfectly average set of parents with whom they live in a nice little house. He likes to go hunting with his father. He likes guns.

The film gives us hints that not all is well with the Thompsons. Nothing dramatic, but his interactions with his wife are bland. His conversations with his parents are empty. We watch them sit around the television laughing blankly at some broad comedy.

Then he kills his wife and mother, loads up a bag full of weapons, sits atop an oil storage tank, and begins taking potshots at cars on a nearby highway. When the cops arrive he escapes, making his way to a drive-thru playing some old film starring Byron Orlok.

Bogdanovich shoots all of this with a low-key style. He wisely doesn’t make any overt statements about movies and violence, allowing the viewer to draw their own conclusions.

It is a fascinating film and one that amazes me that it ever got made. There aren’t a lot of people who could take that mandate from Roger Corman and make something at all watchable, that Bogdanovich turned it into something great is a minor miracle.