Targets (1968 Peter Bogdanovich & scr)

Yes, it was originally that Karloff owed Roger Corman two days' work, which is how Peter got the gig - in fact, Karloff worked five days, and Peter had another eighteen, to make nevertheless a 'B' movie with class, one that could look down on 'A' pictures of the same time. Despite budget limitations it's very classily done, and seems to me to have little nods to people like Hitch (Rear Window) and Welles (that vertical tracking shot like Citizen Kane), and clearly Hawks, which Bogdanovich himself, playing the director, finds running on TV and immediately becomes hooked (it's Karloff again, in The Criminal Code).

Polly Platt's contribution to the story (revealed in the director's blog 'The Plot Thickens'), the apple pie serial killer, based on the 'Texas Tower Sniper' Charles Whitman, makes a chilling element much more scary than anything Karloff would appear in (thus underlining the irony of this film, in which Karloff ultimately dispatches the killer in an almost comical but stunning finale) - I've a feeling I've completely contradicted myself there. Anyway, uncredited, Sam Fuller also contributed many ideas to the screenplay. (Bogdanovich's character is called Samuel Michaels - Fuller's middle name).

Verna Fields has an early credit as a sound editor, and she does a good job (the car stereo gets louder the closer it is to the camera), and all the freeway shooting scene was shot silent, with twenty eight to thirty audio tracks added by her afterwards. And the cutting is great, for example in the scene that sniper Tim O'Kelly tries to shake off a following police car. The scenes with Peter and Karloff are great, and Nancy Hsueh acquits herself as the involved PA.

Laszlo Kovacs makes a good early impression in his night scenes, though the cigarette-in-the-dark Rear Window moment is amusingly cheesy - and some of the night exterior shots are funny in that you can hardly see anything - the ending is a beautiful, low budget mish-mash.

Overall it's very competent - you can see that Peter knows exactly what he's doing (long, slow track in on Karloff whilst he's going his 'appointment in Samarra' story) and had delivered his first and only thriller. That scene is preceded by a journalist asking Karloff the most mundane questions, which in itself is funny as Peter had already had years of experience talking to great directors, and you can be sure he didn't start by asking 'What's it feel like being in motion pictures?' (although while writing this I'm watching Peter's John Ford documentary and the scene where he interviews him in front of Monument Valley and Ford gives terse, one word answers, is hilarious). In fact this moment of Peter the director playing the film director protecting the star playing a star against the stupid journalist is very memorable and sweet.

Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were both murdered before the film's release and as such, Paramount became nervous and it played hardly at all. (That was a bad sentence.) Though the reviews were good, particularly that in the New York Times.

The nonchalant sandwich before the killing starts...

Love the clouds in this shot