Medium Cool
Haskell Wexler (1969)
The first unusual thing is the opening credits, which name all the main technical crew but none of the cast. It’s surely not a coincidence that this is the work of a man known primarily as a cinematographer. By the time he wrote and directed (as well as photographed) Medium Cool, Haskell Wexler had shot films such as America, America, In the Heat of the Night, The Thomas Crown Affair and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which he won his first Academy Award. The second came with Bound for Glory (1976); other movies on which Wexler worked in the 1970s include One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (until he and Miloš Forman fell out), Coming Home and Days of Heaven (although Néstor Almendros received the main credit, and the Oscar). Wexler directed several documentaries and was still working well into his eighties but in the course of his long life – he died in 2015 at the age of ninety-three – he made only one more dramatic feature after this one (the little-known war film Latino (1985)).
To label Medium Cool a drama is to understate what makes it famous – a distinctive cinéma vérité style and content that mixes fictional and non-fictional elements. The setting is Chicago in 1968. The story culminates in the notorious events around the Democratic Convention in the city in August of that year. Wexler both supplies a state-of-the-nation report and explores – or, at least, presents – a specific ethical dilemma for journalists and filmmakers: the balance of power between their professional or creative responsibilities and their human ones. (This central moral concern occasionally expands into a critique of voyeurism more largely.) The voices of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are heard on TV and radio; their faces appear on posters on the walls of homes. The film begins and ends with a road accident. These crashes are clearly essential to Wexler’s scheme but they also bring to mind Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967), at least in retrospect. It’s clear by the end of Medium Cool that Godard is, for Wexler, both a political and a technical inspiration. According to Paul Cronin’s September 2001 Sight & Sound article, used by BFI for their programme note, the final shot ‘is a direct homage to the surprise ending of Le Mépris’. The wall posters also include one of Jean-Paul Belmondo in a still from Breathless.
In the opening scene, two local television newsmen photograph a car crash victim (she’s still alive, though barely conscious: we hear her moan quietly) before putting in a call to the emergency services. In the background, the small figure of a man crossing a bridge over the road pauses for a few moments to look down at the crash scene before walking on. One of the photojournalists is John Cassellis (Robert Forster), who becomes the main character in Medium Cool. In the final scene, Cassellis’s own vehicle crashes into a roadside tree. He and his passenger Eileen Horton (Verna Bloom), a young woman to whom he’s grown close, are driving at speed away from the mayhem in the area close to the International Amphitheater, the Convention venue. A news report on the soundtrack announces that Cassellis was critically injured in the accident and his passenger killed. A passing motorist stops briefly to get a snap of the wreckage. The soundtrack now reprises one of the chants of demonstrators protesting the aggressive police and armed forces response in the parks adjacent to the International Amphitheater: ‘The whole world’s watching, the whole world’s watching … ‘
These combinations of image and spoken word state Wexler’s theme clearly, not to say obviously, but he leaves nothing to chance. He cuts from the first scene on the highway to a drinks reception where a group of journalists, including Cassellis and his colleague Gus (Peter Bonerz), and their guests debate the ethics of photographing bloodshed and tragedy. The explicitly political features in what follows include an interview with a young African-American man, confronting the camera to confirm the race tensions of the time, and Cassellis’s discovery that the Chicago TV channel for which he works has been passing material gathered by him and his colleagues to the FBI. (Cassellis kicks up a fuss, gets fired and turns freelance, in time to cover the Convention.) Medium Cool is most compelling, however, when itself an instance of exploiting actuality – especially when actors in the film appear in the frame with the real demonstrators in Chicago’s Grant Park etc.
The collision of fact and fiction was, for Wexler, fortunate but hardly unexpected. As he told Paul Cronin for the 2001 Sight & Sound piece:
‘[Robert] Kennedy was killed a couple of weeks before we were due to start shooting, so I got a small crew together along with my two principal actors and we all went to the funeral in Washington DC to shoot scenes I thought would have a use in the final film. We also went to watch the Illinois National Guard, which was preparing for the expected troubles in Chicago later that summer and got some great footage of them in training. … We all knew for months beforehand that there would be clashes … What surprised us was their extent. For my film I’d planned to hire extras and dress them up as Chicago policemen, but in the end Mayor Richard Daley provided us with all the extras we needed.’
Wexler’s opportunist camera was obviously one of many recording the clashes but his film’s subject is powerfully realised in the moment when Eileen approaches an actually injured man and is waved away by the woman tending him, who resents the intrusion.
Eileen Horton is a single mother, recently moved to Chicago with her adolescent son Harold (Harold Blankenship) from West Virginia, where she was a schoolteacher. Cassellis’s contact with the family starts through a chance encounter with Harold. After he’s ended his relationships with both the local TV channel and his current girlfriend (Marianna Hill), Cassellis increasingly spends time with Eileen and her son, and becomes fond of them both. Harold likes and respects Cassellis too until he’s startled by catching sight of his mother kissing the new man in their life. Harold disappears from home and Eileen goes desperately searching for him in the city centre, getting caught up in the Convention disturbances as a result. This convergence is crucial to Wexler’s concerns, of course, but it’s also a plot contrivance – and, as such, an illustration of one of two main reasons why Medium Cool falls short as film drama.
Her immersion in the crowd upstages Eileen’s particular personal concerns, even though she never visually blends in with them. She’s emphatically conspicuous in a vivid yellow dress (unlike any of the clothes she wore in earlier scenes). Wexler is generally indecisive about how much substance to give to the mother and son as characters. It’s suggested at different points that Eileen’s husband may be either dead or in Vietnam or have walked out on his wife and son. Although it’s not a problem that the truth about this is never made clear, the flashbacks to Harold with his father (Charles Geary) feel superfluous, when the boy isn’t the central consciousness in the story.
Wexler’s lack of experience in directing actors leads to some insecure playing. In later life, Robert Forster has proved himself a superb character actor – most famously as the bail-bondsman in Jackie Brown (1997), most recently in Twin Peaks on television last year – but Forster was also inexperienced at the time of Medium Cool. His screen career had begun only in 1967 with his minor albeit key role in Reflections in a Golden Eye. Here, his face takes the camera strongly and he’s an exceptionally athletic presence: running down a corridor or chasing through a car park, Forster gives an impression of real speed. Cassellis was a boxer before he became a journalist – a career history that seems designed to advertise Forster’s impressive physicality in a scene with a punchbag. He’s vocally less expressive; much of the time, he speaks in what sounds an artificially loud voice. Verna Bloom as Eileen is OK but looks unsure whether or not she’s meant to come over like a person in a documentary – an uncertainty that afflicts some of the bit-part players too (though not Peter Boyle, in a taking cameo as a ‘gun clinic’ manager, supervising middle-aged white housewives who want to learn how to shoot). As the teenage boy, Harold Blankenship, who appears never to have acted subsequently, is more naturally convincing than the adult leads. The ambitious, historically significant Medium Cool is an absorbing, fluid piece of moviemaking but those unconventional opening credits hint at some of its relative weaknesses, as well as its strengths.
29 May 2018