Medium Cool
Medium Cool | |
---|---|
Directed by | Haskell Wexler |
Written by | Haskell Wexler |
Produced by | Tully Friedman Haskell Wexler Jerrold Wexler |
Starring | Robert Forster Verna Bloom Peter Bonerz Marianna Hill Harold Blankenship |
Cinematography | Haskell Wexler |
Edited by | Verna Fields |
Music by | Mike Bloomfield |
Production company | H & J Pictures[1] |
Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
Release date |
|
Running time | 110 minutes[2] |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $800,000[1] |
Box office | $5.5 million (rentals)[3] |
Medium Cool is a 1969 American
The movie was met with widespread acclaim from numerous critics, including
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
Cast
- Robert Forster as John Cassellis
- Verna Bloom as Eileen
- Peter Bonerz as Gus
- Marianna Hill as Ruth
- Harold Blankenship as Harold
- Charles Geary as Harold's father
- Sid McCoy as Frank Baker
- Christine Bergstrom as Dede
- Peter Boyle as Gun clinic manager
- China Lee as Roller derby patron
Production
The title comes from
The music in the film was assembled by guitarist
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
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
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
- List of American films of 1969
- Prologue, a 1970 Canadian film that also blends cinéma vérité-style documentary and fiction, set against the Democratic National Convention
References
- ^ AFI|Catalog. Retrieved November 29, 2022.
- ^ "Medium Cool (15)". British Board of Film Classification. October 7, 1969. Retrieved October 15, 2013.
- ^ "Big Rental Films of 1969". Variety. January 7, 1970. p. 15.
- ^ "Medium Cool: An Interview with Actress Marianna Hill". rssing.com. December 17, 2016. Retrieved February 24, 2022.
- ^ Cronin 2001.
- ISBN 978-0-8264-2977-3. Retrieved September 23, 2012.
- ^ a b Ebert, Roger (September 21, 1969). "Medium Cool". RogerEbert.com. Retrieved November 29, 2022.
- ^ 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.
- ^ a b c Canby 1969.
- ^ "Medium Cool". Harvard Film Archive. January 31, 2020. Retrieved November 29, 2022.
Bibliography
- Arthur, Paul (Summer 2002). "Medium Cool". Cineaste. Vol. 27, no. 3. pp. 45–46.
- Canby, Vincent (August 28, 1969). "Real Events of '68 Seen in 'Medium Cool'". The New York Times.
- Cronin, Paul (September 2001). "Mid Summer Mavericks". Sight & Sound. pp. 24–27. Archived from the originalon March 24, 2008.
External links
- Medium Cool at IMDb
- Medium Cool at Rotten Tomatoes
- 'Look out Haskell, it's real': The Making of Medium Cool, a 2001 documentary about Medium Cool
- Medium Cool: Preserving Disorder an essay by Thomas Beard at the Criterion Collection