Medium Cool

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Medium Cool
Theatrical release poster
Directed byHaskell Wexler
Written byHaskell Wexler
Produced byTully Friedman
Haskell Wexler
Jerrold Wexler
StarringRobert Forster
Verna Bloom
Peter Bonerz
Marianna Hill
Harold Blankenship
CinematographyHaskell Wexler
Edited byVerna Fields
Music byMike Bloomfield
Production
company
H & J Pictures[1]
Distributed byParamount Pictures
Release date
  • August 27, 1969 (1969-08-27)
Running time
110 minutes[2]
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$800,000[1]
Box office$5.5 million (rentals)[3]

Medium Cool is a 1969 American

documentary
filmmaking techniques, as well as for combining fictional and non-fictional content.

The movie was met with widespread acclaim from numerous critics, including

Siskel & Ebert, both calling the movie a "well-crafted masterpiece." The movie was also named one of the greatest movies of 1969, as well as one of the most influential movies in the New Hollywood
movement. Robert Forster was also met with universal acclaim for his performance.

In 2003, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Plot

John Cassellis is a television news cameraman. He and his sound recorder dispassionately film images of car accidents rather than help the victims. Cassellis is seemingly hardened to ethical and social issues; he is more concerned with his personal life and pursuing audience-grabbing stories. Yet once Cassellis finds out that his news station has been providing the stories and information gathered by the cameramen and news journalists to the FBI, he becomes enraged. The news station creates an excuse to fire him, but he soon finds another job free-lancing at the Democratic National Convention.

In the course of his television job, Cassellis meets Eileen, a single mother, and her son, Harold, who have moved from West Virginia to Chicago. Harold tells a woman canvassing the neighborhood that his father, Buddy, is "at Vietnam", but later tells Cassellis that he just took off one day and never came back. Eileen tells Cassellis that "Buddy is dead." Cassellis grows fond of them both, mother and son.

When Harold goes missing, Eileen goes to the site of the convention to ask Cassellis for help. She finds herself in the midst of the

riots
. After witnessing acts of police brutality, Eileen finds Cassellis. As they drive to an undisclosed location, unaware that Harold has returned home, Cassellis accidentally crashes the car into a tree, killing Eileen and critically injuring himself. A passing driver stops to photograph the accident, after which he leaves the heavily damaged car behind.

Cast

Production

The title comes from

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in which he described TV as a "cool" medium (the "cooler" the medium, "the more someone has to uncover and engage in the media" in order to "fill in the blanks").[1]
The film questions the role and responsibilities of television and its newscasts.

The music in the film was assembled by guitarist

rock musician Frank Zappa, as well as the Love instrumental "Emotions" over the opening credits and as a recurring theme. Wexler has said the scene under the opening credits with the bike messenger delivering film to the television station was inspired by Jean Cocteau's film Orpheus
.

Harold Blankenship, who played the young boy Harold in Medium Cool, was tracked down by filmmaker Paul Cronin (who made the documentary Look out Haskell, it's real) and appears in Cronin's film Sooner or Later. Blankenship named his first son after Haskell Wexler.

Marianna Hill's full nude scene wasn't planned but the actress explained, "Haskell was such a lovely man and I knew he couldn't cause me any harm. I would never have done that for anybody else, but he was so interested in getting to the truth of a matter, and it was really his story."[4]

Historical context

Shot at a time of great social and political

'X' rating. The censors "objected to the language and the nudity", Wexler said later; "What no one had the nerve to say was that it was a political 'X'".[5] In 1970 the film was re-rated 'R'.[6]

Critical response

Much of the critical response to Medium Cool concentrated on the revolutionary techniques of combining fact and fiction rather than the plot of the film. In his 1969 review, Roger Ebert wrote "In Medium Cool, Wexler forges back and forth through several levels...There are fictional characters in real situations...there are real characters in fictional situations".[7] While Ebert did not find the plot to be particularly innovative, he acknowledged that Wexler purposely left it up to his audience to fill in the gaps of the romance and at the same time presented images of great political significance. Ultimately, Ebert credited Wexler with masterfully combining multiple levels of film making to create a film that is "important and absorbing".[7] Ebert placed the film second on his list of the 10 best pictures of 1969.[8]

In his 1969 review of the film for

Guernica, a picture of America in the process of exploding into fragmented bits of hostility, suspicion, fear and violence".[9] Like Ebert, Canby felt that the real significance of the film was in its capturing of a political situation rather than its conventional success through plot and character development. Canby wrote that "Medium Cool is an awkward and even pretentious movie, but... it has an importance that has nothing to do with literature".[9]

Film archives

A 35mm safety print is housed at the Harvard Film Archive.[10]

Home media

Medium Cool was released to home video on May 21, 2013, by the Criterion Collection (under license from Paramount) as a Region 1 DVD and as a Region 1 Blu-Ray.

See also

References

  1. ^
    AFI|Catalog
    . Retrieved November 29, 2022.
  2. ^ "Medium Cool (15)". British Board of Film Classification. October 7, 1969. Retrieved October 15, 2013.
  3. ^ "Big Rental Films of 1969". Variety. January 7, 1970. p. 15.
  4. ^ "Medium Cool: An Interview with Actress Marianna Hill". rssing.com. December 17, 2016. Retrieved February 24, 2022.
  5. ^ Cronin 2001.
  6. . Retrieved September 23, 2012.
  7. ^ a b Ebert, Roger (September 21, 1969). "Medium Cool". RogerEbert.com. Retrieved November 29, 2022.
  8. ^ Ebert, Roger (December 15, 2004). "Ebert's 10 Best Lists: 1967-Present". RogerEbert.com. Archived from the original on October 2, 2013. Retrieved March 17, 2013.
  9. ^ a b c Canby 1969.
  10. ^ "Medium Cool". Harvard Film Archive. January 31, 2020. Retrieved November 29, 2022.

Bibliography

External links