The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (26 page)

Few directorial debuts have been so startling, so self-assured as Peter Bogdanovich's 1968 film
Targets
. Working with a microbudget, Bogdanovich skillfully knitted together two seemingly unrelated stories and gave horror legend Boris Karloff his last good role.

Like so many filmmakers, Bogdanovich got his big break courtesy of Roger Corman. The legendary director/producer offered Bogdanovich some outtakes from
The Terror
, a low-budget Corman shocker, and the services of Boris Karloff, who contractually owed Corman two days on set. Bogdanovich's task was to find a way to turn those elements into a movie, quickly and cheaply.

Working with his then-wife Polly Platt, Bogdanovich pounded out a script (allegedly with some unaccredited help from Orson Welles and Samuel Fuller) partially inspired by the 1966 shooting spree of University of Texas clocktower-sniper Charles Whitman. To that, Bogdanovich added a parallel story involving Karloff as Byron Orlock, a monster movie legend nearing the end of a long and distinguished career.

Orlock wants to retire from films. His presence in Hollywood has been reduced to pumping out bad drive-in horror movies, and he wants out. He feels that his films are inconsequential in light of the real-life horrors of Vietnam and inner-city violence. A money-hungry director, Sammy Michaels (played by Bogdanovich), tries to convince Orlock to take one more kick at the can and make one last film.

At the same time in this fractured timeline of a story, a Vietnam vet named Bobby Thompson (Tim O'Kelly) is nearing his breaking point. From the outside he looks like a normal all-American kid, but he has come back from the war deeply psychologically scarred and with an unhealthy (for those around him, at least) fascination with guns. He seems in control until one beautiful cloudless California morning when he overloads, shoots his mother, his wife, and even an unlucky delivery boy. In a confession note left with the bodies he writes chillingly that he expects to be caught, but will kill many more before that time.

Here Bogdanovich begins to meld the two unrelated stories, building tension until their inevitable confrontation in the climax of the film. Orlock is seen grudgingly preparing to make a personal appearance at a drive-in to promote his last film,
The Terror
. Bobby lies in wait on an oil storage tank, steadily picking off motorists on the freeway, while calmly eating a sandwich with a Pepsi chaser. After narrowly escaping the police, Bobby flees to the drive-in to hide under the cloak of darkness. Orlock arrives by limo, preparing to meet and greet with his fans. At dusk Bobby makes his way behind the huge movie screen and begins shooting. As panic ensues everyone tries to escape, except for Orlock.

Bogdanovich never lets go of the tension in
Targets
. It builds and builds until the very closing seconds of the film, and more astoundingly he does it without resorting to gimmicks. There are no fancy camera moves à la Brian De Palma, no suspenseful music to manipulate the viewer, just superb editing and pacing. The scene in which Bobby randomly guns down motorists on the freeway while eating his lunch is particularly unnerving. Shot from his point of view, high atop an oil storage tank, we don't see close-ups of the dead or any blood; they are anonymous victims of a lunatic, seen through the scope of a gun and shot between bites of his sandwich. The absence of music in the sequence makes it terrifying, almost as though we're seeing news footage or a scene from a documentary on serial thrill killers. Bogdanovich has rarely ventured into the thriller realm, and it's a shame, because he has a master's touch with suspense.

I had to wonder while watching
Targets
if Bogdanovich was taking a metaphorical shot at his boss, B-movie king Roger Corman, by staging a sniper scene at a drive-in, the very place Corman made his money. Or was he showing contempt for the unsophisticated middle-American audiences who flocked to the open-air theaters on the weekends?

Tim O'Kelly is effective as Bobby, his outward calm just a shell to hide the rage and pain that lives within, but the film really belongs to his octogenarian co-star. Boris Karloff once said, “As long as they want me, I'll work till the end.” And he did; in a career that spanned almost 200 films, Karloff stayed in front of the cameras until just a few months before his death in 1969 at age 81.
Targets
would have been a great capper to his long career, but unfortunately he continued to say “yes” to virtually any producer who would hire him, and in the last year of his life made several Mexploitation horror films with titles like
Alien Terror
and
Isle of the Snake People
. See
Targets
instead, and appreciate how good an actor Karloff was. He portrays Orlock as a kind yet cynical, world-weary fellow. “I'm an anachronism,” he says, feeling left behind by the changing pace of life in a world that he helped create but has no place in.

To see Karloff at his best check out the “Appointment in Samarra” scene. He tells a haunting fable about the consequences of trying to escape our fate in one long 95-second take as the camera slowly glides into his face. His deep, slightly lisping voice (familiar to all as the narrator of
The Grinch Who Stole Christmas
) dances over the macabre lines, weaving a spooky story about the Angel of Death that cleverly foreshadows the conflict yet to come in the movie. Karloff himself considered Orlock to be his greatest performance.

Targets
was not a success when first released in 1968. A sniper story, even one that could be considered anti-gun, was too timely in the wake of the Kennedy and King assassinations. As a result the film was poorly marketed and only played in limited release.

Producer Jed Buell could be called many things, but politically correct isn't on the roll call. He elevated bad taste to an art form, producing novelty Western movies with unusual casts. In 1939 he unleashed
Harlem on the Prairie
, specifically geared toward the 800 or so African-American theaters in the United States. But his “finest” moment came a year earlier with the release of
The Terror of Tiny Town
, the world's first (and to date, only) all-midget musical motion picture.

Buell stumbled across the idea for the movie following an offhand remark by his assistant. “If this economy drive keeps on,” he said, “we'll be using midgets for actors.” Buell assembled his cast through talent agencies, radio broadcasts, and newspaper ads promising “Big Salaries for Little People.” He even recruited a troupe of 14 circus performers from Hawaii. In all he cast almost 60 actors with an average height of 3'8”, ranging from teenagers to pensioners.

The storyline (by Fred Myton and Clarence Marks) involves a feud between the Preston and Lawson ranches. Tension between the two families has reached an all-time high, as each believes the other is responsible for a series of mysterious cow disappearances. What they don't know is that evil gunslinger Bat Haines (“Little Billy” Rhodes) is actually behind all the trouble in Tiny Town, working in cahoots with the corrupt sheriff. Our hero (you know he's the good guy because he's wearing all white) Buck Lawson (Billy Curtis) suspects that someone other than the Prestons might be the source of the town's woes, but is preoccupied with wooing the lovely Nancy Preston (Yvonne Moray). Haines realizes that Buck is onto him, and tries to frame him for the murder of Tex Preston (Billy Platt). Proclaiming his innocence, Buck avoids a lynch mob, and at the end there is the inevitable showdown between good and evil in a cabin wired with dynamite.

This sounds like a typical Saturday matinee bottom-of-the-bill serial Western, but add in actors of small stature, a duck that walks backward, and cowboys who chase one another around on Shetland ponies, and you've got big-time entertainment.

The Terror of Tiny Town
is the height of exploitation filmmaking. The diminutive actors are never treated with any dignity, and jokes are made constantly at their expense. In the film's prologue Buck proclaims that once this movie is seen, “I'm going to be the biggest star in Hollywood.” “No way,” counters Bat Haines, “
I'm
going to be the biggest star in Hollywood.” In fact, the script is a goldmine of cheesy “big” and “small” jokes. “That's a big order for me,” says one character. “You'll get smallpox from him!” warns another.

Modern exploitation films never get this bizarre. Despite the run-of-the-mill story and action, the very idea of the novelty casting of little people makes
The Terror of Tiny Town
a fascinating time capsule of a different era in Hollywood's history. Tinsel Town has never been a dignified place, but this film is astonishingly politically incorrect, and that is what makes it a must-rent. It displays the lengths producers will go to put bums in seats. Like it or hate it, you have to admit that you've never seen anything quite like it, which in the cookie-cutter world of modern cinema, is quite a feat.

The Terror of Tiny Town
was a box office success, easily earning back its $100,000 production cost. It was such a hit that Buell developed sequel fever, planning a series of little people movies. The first was a retelling of the Paul Bunyan yarn announced in
Variety
on July 20, 1938. Fortunately for the Lilliputian actors and audiences alike, that film was never made.

While most of
Tiny Town
's cast returned to their day jobs after the shoot, several of the actors had long careers in Hollywood. At 2'6” Yvonne Moray became known as a smaller version of Greta Garbo, and went on to appear in several films. But it was Billy Curtis who had the most productive career, and was responsible for one oft-told Hollywood legend. He appeared in 40 movies and television shows until his death in 1986.

The most famous entry on his filmography is 1939's
The Wizard of Oz
. His uncredited performance as City Father pales by comparison to his behavior on the set. Charles Schram, a makeup man at mgm recalls, “Billy Curtis was the handsomest and had the most style [of the 124 little people hired for the movie]. He was quite arrogant. He looked down on the others because he had had a degree of success in vaudeville.” He apparently swaggered around the set, and made several passes at Judy Garland, who rebuffed him saying, “Mother wouldn't approve.” Curtis also claims credit for saving Margaret Hamilton from an on-set fire, and helping Judy Garland sneak off the lot to meet her boyfriend. Both stories have been denied.

But it was one comment from Judy Garland that immortalized Curtis and his Munchkin brethren forever. “They were drunks,” she said, allegedly referring to Curtis. “They got smashed every night, and the police had to pick them up in butterfly nets.”

The title
They Might Be Giants
is an allusion to Don Quixote and his fight with a series of windmills he mistook for giants, an offbeat premise that fuels this film. George C. Scott plays wealthy, retired New York City judge Justin Playfair, who, downhearted over the loss of his wife, becomes convinced he is Sherlock Holmes. He sees injustice everywhere, and figures it must be the work of the world's most evil man — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Dr. Moriarty. Dressed in a deerstalker hat, he searches New York for his nemesis with the aid of a female psychiatrist conveniently named Mildred Watson (Joanne Woodward). Watson is a dedicated career-driven woman who has never allowed herself much of a personal life — until now. She falls for the retired judge, at first drawn to him in a professional sense, and later to his keen deductive powers as a detective. Their love story is poignant and humorous, as two damaged people come together, each providing the other with a crucial slice of humanity that was otherwise missing in their lives.

A subplot involving a conniving brother who is trying to have Playfair committed to an insane asylum so he can take control of his fortune spices up the action, but it is the performances of Scott and Woodward that keep the film fresh and enjoyable. Scott plays the judge as a sensitive and loveable character, a far cry from the gruff roles he usually undertook. In an endearingly deluded way he really believes he is the legendary sleuth, and because of his conviction, the audience begins to believe it too. Once the game is afoot, funny scenes abound. Woodward's ill-fated attempt to cook dinner displays her comic timing, while a food throwing riot in a supermarket is flat-out slapstick.

The central theme of this lighthearted story is reflected in the title. In the back of a taxi cab Playfair says, “They might be giants,” and at once the movie's premise gels. There just
might
be windmills, just as Playfair just
might
be Sherlock Holmes. Imagination can be a powerful thing, and
They Might Be Giants
bristles with flights of fancy.

When asked how he made Playfair so convincing, Scott said, “I didn't play the character as if I were portraying Sherlock Holmes. I played him as a delusional man who
fantasized
that he was Sherlock Holmes.” In a broader pop culture sense, the film inspired two art rockers from Brooklyn, New York, supplying the name for their band. They Might Be Giants won an Emmy for their theme song from the sitcom
Malcolm in the Middle
, and have their own offbeat take on the film. “It's about how insanity is groovy. It was the insanity-chic period of cinema,” says John Linnell. “It's one of those ‘Who's crazy?' movies.”

“‘Who belongs in the asylum? The crazy people or the people who aren't crazy?'” adds John Flansburgh.