MICKEY ONE A-
USA (93 mi) 1965
d: Arthur Penn
The ride was over, I
was trapped and I find out suddenly I owe a fortune.
—Mickey One (Warren Beatty)
Is there any word from
the Lord? —Jeremiah
37:17
Forget it, you don’t
have to pay. Gambling’s illegal in
Illinois.
—Chicago cops
A rare, one-of-a-kind film, the likes of which they don’t
make any more, all set in a mindblowingly experimental, Black and White underground
noir style, a dissonant portrait of madness, confusion, and fear, perhaps a
reference to the artistic blacklists of the 1950’s during the McCarthyist Red
scare, where nightclub comic Warren Beatty, young and brilliant, supposedly goes
on a drunken gambling rampage and ends up owing some astronomical amount to the
mob, apparently so large an amount they won’t even tell him how much, though he
can’t remember what he did to incur the debt.
Opening wearing a suit in a steambath, Beatty spends the rest of the
film drifting in and out of his own imagination, a dreamlike, nightmarish state
of mind filled with startling imagery where only Fellini comes close in
comparison. Just to comprehend the
inventiveness on display, before the opening credits roll there are nightclub
scenes with the strikingly sensuous Donna Michelle as the Girl doing a kind of
modern dance with a scarf during his gambling euphoria, underwater sequences, mirror
reflections, the use of splitscreen in the same shot, or shots superimposed
over others, but most striking are the close ups of faces saturated in light,
almost like masks, creating a hypnotically surreal effect. Much like the French New Wave, there are
startling jump cuts, showing quick mood swings between what’s real and the
imagination, using a dreamy jazz score by Eddie Sauter with Stan Getz on
saxophone, creating a sad, moody, and melancholic portrait of a man on the run,
as Mickey decides to change his identity and get out of Detroit, which is
immediately followed by visits to hobo jungles and starkly threatening images
of cars being demolished and compacted at a junkyard. The interior mental picture is portrayed as a
nightmarish, existential wasteland. 36
years later the film still feels modernist, like a Waiting for Godot theatrical production where there's only one guy
onstage talking to himself, stuck in his own purgatory.
While it’s hard to make sense out of any of this, as much of
the time Beatty is doing his onstage schtick telling jokes to canned laughter,
where he’s not the least bit funny, but there are definitely signs of ISHTAR
(1987) in his nightclub act. There’s
also a sense of meandering, where the pace of the film mimics the aimlessness
of the character, who would prefer to remain an undiscovered comic. When Mickey moves to a strip club in Chicago,
the city never looked more luminescent, where pristine nighttime panoramas
blend into a daytime skid row district where he hangs out, mostly shots of back
alleys and secondhand stores, where the Polish landlady keeps trying to rent
his room while he’s still in it.
Eventually she succeeds, where Alexandra Stewart as Jenny is thrust upon
him. He goes through an entire
repertoire of conflicting thoughts before deciding she may be the one for him,
all expressed in an endlessly meandering soliloquy that he expresses to
her. It’s a kind of well-written,
off-Broadway theatrical rush, as it’s a highly inventive way to show them
getting to know one another, all communicated through his intensely
personalized mind’s view. Somewhere off
in the distance is Jean Tinguely playing a mime that follows him around like
his conscious, a guy who’s quite inventive and entertaining himself, who puts
on a modern art exhibition called Yes, suggesting courage is freedom,
introducing a large kinetic sculpture, a mechanical monstrosity created by
Robert Fields, an industrial design student at the School of the Art Institute,
that actually plays music before self-destructing into a series of giant
explosions, turning into a blazing bonfire requiring the intervention of the
Chicago Fire Department to put it out, ending the show on a sad note, a
portrait of the American Dream gone wrong.
Wouldn’t you know that there’s an upscale nightclub called Xanadu
that suddenly enters the picture, which is actually the now torn down Gate of
Horn folk club on the southeast corner of Dearborn and Chicago Avenues? There’s also shots of the Woods Theater
downtown which is screening THE CARDINAL (1963), the same theater that
premiered this film in Chicago. The
interior nightclub shots were filmed at Chez Paree, 400 N Wabash, now
defunct. The Xanadu owners themselves
are quite peculiar, where Hurd Hatfield as Castle (a Kafka reference) plays the
eccentric owner who only eats organic food and whose office looks like an antiseptic
hospital room. But when he sees Mickey
perform at the Pickle Club, just another dive strip joint, he won’t take no for
an answer and insists that Mickey come work for him, telling him “The
successful comic is the King of show business,” though Mickey prefers his
anonymity knowing he could be detected at any minute. At this point, the film starts to resemble
the Orson Welles depiction of THE TRIAL (1962), where Mickey becomes K, a
nameless second-hand comic who’s guilty of crimes he may never have never
committed. Jenny attempts to get him to
stop running, where Mickey describes the feeling of being onstage, “Sometimes
it’s the only place in the world where you’re free,” or “Onstage, I’m a Polack
Noel Coward,” perhaps believing all of this madness is in his mind, and helps
prepare him for the Xanadu (a Welles reference), which switches gears on him,
where there’s no visible audience, just an Oz-like voice behind the lone spotlight
in an otherwise completely darkened theater, a nightclub audition from Hell
that is copied almost exactly in Bob Fosse’s LENNY (1974). It’s like being locked inside of your own
conscious with no way out. The film is
an existential ballet of mood swings, highly symbolic, using a hyper aggressive
camera style shot by Ghislain Cloquet that resembles Cassavetes Faces (1968),
yet coming four years earlier and may, in fact, have influenced the young
Cassavetes. It’s a highly ambitious,
modernist style unlike anything else out there on the American film landscape, a
wonderful example of an artist taking a chance, as it’s a unique vision of a
director that has complete control over the finished product, a rarely seen fringe
film made for under $1 million dollars that remains heavily influential, as do
most all of Arthur Penn’s films.
