Medium Cool

Starring:Christine Bergstrom, Harold Blankenship, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Peter Boyle, Edward Croke, Jeff Donaldson, Robert Forster, Charles Geary, Marianna Hill, Doug Kimball, Julia Langhart, Robert McAndrew, Sid McCoy, Sandra Ann Roberts, William Sickinger, Georgia Todda, Marrian Walters, Beverly Younger
Studio: Paramount
Product Type: DVD

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Medium Cool is an almost impossible oddity: director Haskel Wexler wanted to shoot a fictional, narrative film wherein actors mingled with real people in an uncontrolled social environment. With that in mind, he began filming a movie about racial tensions in Chicago during the weeks prior to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, on the assumption that there would be a riot there. Then he brought his cast, crew, and camera to the scene of the proposed mayhem, and waited. . . and lo and behold, civil disorder broke out. It's intensely strange to see actors, playing characters, interacting in a real-life situation with real cops and real hippies fighting and running about. This is made stranger still by the story, about a reporter covering the growing unrest in the black ghettos of the city who discovers that the FBI may be in cahoots with his network. In preparing his script, Wexler assumed that the riot would be racial, but in fact it turned out that most of the rioters were white, so the final scenes seem to interrupt the narrative and make the film an odd pastiche and a commentary on the lack of connection between politics and life. Perhaps more of a curiosity than a wholly successful film, Medium Cool is still worth seeing for its striking footage and unprecedented combination of the real and the imaginary. --James DiGiovanna

Customer Reviews:

Medium Cool.......2007-06-28

Haskell Wexler's one-of-a-kind film seamlessly blends narrative and documentary forms, as the actors actually played their scenes as the Chicago riots were exploding all around them. Thus "Medium Cool" attains a heightened sense of tension, immediacy, and danger, as the line blurs between drama and reality. Evocative and extremely well-played by Forster and Bloom, this is a fascinating time-capsule for the ages. Look for Peter Boyle as an impassioned right-winger.

Excellent Counterculture Cinema.......2007-04-15

`Medium Cool' was directed, scripted, produced and filmed in 1968 by Haskell Wexler who had had success the previous year working as a cinematographer for Norman Jewison (In the Heat Of The Night, 1968) and Mike Nichols (`Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?', 1967). He would also later work with George Lucas, Hal Ashby, Milos Forman and Terence Mallick in the 70s shooting important films of the `New Hollywood'.

Of all the films considered to be counterculture works this has to rank as one of the best mostly for the fact that it accurately captures the atmosphere of the period. I rank this up there with other films like `Punishment Park' (Watkins, 1970) and `Zabriskie Point' (Antonioni, 1970).

The title is from Marshall McLuhan who described TV as a cool medium.

Incredible time capsule of late 60s Chicago.......2007-01-16

This film is a must-have for anyone interested in the sociology, history, and physical development of Chicago. Done in a neo-realist style using a mixture of professional and amateur actors, the story revolves around real scenes shot during the 1968 Democratic Convention and the "police riot" that ensued. The deus-ex-machina ending is a bit disappointing, but the street scenes and footage are mind-blowing for students of Chicago and its history.

Something very special..........2005-07-20

Absorbing, thought provoking and, above all, a unique record of an important "place & time", why "Medium Cool" still fails to gain the attention it deserves remains one of life's great mysteries.

First off, it's a pretty good if somewhat disjointed story... two "world-wise" middle class news reporters are sent to film the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and become unwittingly involved in its political demonstrations, the inner city problems that have precipitated them, and the lives of a single mother and her young son in this harsh, confusing and seriously under-privileged world. Its acting, in particular from Robert Forster as the lead reporter and the 13 year old Harold Blankenship as the son, is excellent and at times so effective that it's difficult to remember you're watching a rigidly sequenced film rather than a social documentary. And, it's overlaid with some quite stunning cinema-photography from director Haskell Wexler, one of America's very best exponents of the art, backed up by a perfectly pitched late 60's soundtrack.

Good enough so far, but that's just the start. Add-in its extensive live footage from the streets of Chicago as the riots develop, taken by the film's camera crew as they themselves are caught-up in a very "real" political drama, its ominous sequencing of the build up of events from a fun "day in the park" for the hippies/yippies to serious "police state" level violence, its equally chilling images of what was going on inside the Convention Hall while all of this was taking place, and the clever and disturbing scenes of the mother's desperate search for her lost son as Wexler films her within the increasingly anarchic crowds of demonstrators & troops actually on the streets at the time, and you've got... something very special.

Part film and part documentary, not all of what you think is "real" in "Medium Cool" is, and the lines between live and acted scenes are sometimes confusingly and frustratingly blurred, as in the famous call from one of the camera crew of "look out Haskell this is real" as a tear gas canister lands in front of them, which was in fact over-dubbed afterwards. But that's the whole point of the film as the final, almost startling scenes reveal. How far is the media in control? Is what you're seeing real, distorted or contrived? Wexler's brilliance is to take this underlying theme and to mould it into a fascinating exploration of inner city life, American society in a period of huge change, and the power/needs of the media in a TV dominated world, while, in parallel, producing a gripping record of what it's like to be in the centre of a demonstration that's spiralling out of control. Juxtaposing the impersonality of reporting with the very personal situations that are involved, it raises a whole series of questions on the way without falling into the trap of most films of the era in trying to ram home too many answers. And, as a result, it remains as relevant today as it did then.

Quite rightly regarded as one of the best "counter culture" films of the late 60's and much richer and more thought provoking than this classification usually implies, it remains one of the most under-rated films out there.

I had to see it twice!.......2004-12-10

I saw "Medium Cool" shortly after I had been drafted in 1969 - in San Antonio where I was going through basic training for conscientious objectors. I was so blown away by this film I sat through it a second time (you could do that in those days) to try to take it all in. The mixture of documentary style direction with actors playing characters was a new idea, but to put them into an explosive (& eventually exploding) situation was a stroke of cinematic genius by Wexler. The movie also received an "X" rating for a scene you could probably show during family viewing hours on TV these days.

The thing that still stands out in my mind after all these years is Robert Forster's characterization of the news cameraman. Working in this "cool" medium, he stays detached from the people he films almost to the point of inhumanity. In the opening scene, Forster and sound man Peter Bonerz come upon a crash on an expressway, the car against a wall with its horn blowing continuously and a bleeding woman lying on the ground next to the open passenger's door. They procede to start filming the scene, but Bonerz compains that the horn is wiping out all other sound he might get. Forster goes to the open (from the crash) hood of the car & yanks out the horn wires. They then continue filming the scene without ever considering calling for help for the injured woman on the ground until they're finished. You begin to wonder who are these guys who callously put getting the story, which they would have gotten anyway, ahead of helping someone who's been injured.

Two other scenes come to mind which give insight into Forster's character. In one scene with girlfriend Marianna Hill, she challenges him by asking him about a scene from the movie "Mondo Cane". This scene involved tortoises on a Pacific island whose sense of direction had been affected by atomic bomb tests to the point where they no longer knew how to find the ocean. She asks Forster if, after they were done filming, the cameramen might have turned the tortoises around and pointed them toward the ocean. She really wants to know what he would have done. Forster replies, "How do I know? Those were French cameramen."

The second scene occurs when Forster is watching the mourning for the death of Martin Luther King on TV at Verna Bloom's house. His reaction to the outpouring of grief & emotion on the screen is to say, "Jesus, I love to shoot film."

Forster (& the others I've mentioned) are great in this film. And among the other points he makes with this film, Wexler reminds us that to the TV camera, our lives, joys, accomplishments and especially our sufferings are reduced to being just frames of film which may occasionally be newsworthy.

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