Main Cast: Warren Beatty, Hurd Hatfield, Alexandra Stewart, Teddy Hart, Jeff Corey
Release Year: 1965
Country: US
Run Time: 93 minutes
Plot
Often described as a French New Wave film made in Hollywood, Arthur Penn's 1965 art movie enters the unsettlingly paranoid world of a nightclub comic on the run from the Mob. Having fooled around with the wrong blonde and gambled himself into an unpayable debt, an entertainer (Warren Beatty) flees to Chicago, where he hides out and changes his name to Mickey One. He hooks up with Jenny (Alexandra Stewart) and Castle (Hurd Hatfield), the owner of the nightclub Xanadu, but he cannot shake the paralyzing conviction that he's being pursued no matter where he is. After being beaten by unknown assailants, Mickey finally decides that escape is impossible, so he might as well just do his thing. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
Review
Eschewing any semblance of conventional Hollywood narrative, Arthur Penn and writer Alan Surgal present a world skewed through Mickey's neuroses, putting viewers in the position of his unease and uncertainty. Steeped in New Wave devices like abrupt editing and jittery location shooting, Mickey One evades easy answers to the main character's psychological dilemma in favor of disjointed actions and evocative imagery, like a hapless Mickey (Warren Beatty) chased around a dark stage by a spotlight. Deemed bizarre and opaque in 1965, Mickey One disappeared swiftly after it was released. Despite this poor reception, however, Beatty hired Penn to direct what would be Beatty's debut as a producer: the landmark "Hollywood New Wave" film Bonnie and Clyde (1967). As the influence of European cinema on the new Hollywood generation became apparent in the work of such other directors as Mike Nichols and Martin Scorsese, and paranoia became a persistent theme of the early 1970s, Mickey One now seems an artistically challenging sign of things to come. Its art-movie atmosphere of malaise and anxiety, together with its romantic anti-hero and unconventional style, would all be familiar elements of American movies ten years later. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
Kamatari Fujiwara - The Artist; Franchot Tone - Ruby Lapp; Benny Dunn - Nightclub Comic; Mike Fish - Italian Restaurant Owner; Ralph Foody - Police Captain; Norman Gottschalk - The Evangelist; Charlene Lee - The Singer; Donna Michelle - The Girl; Helen Witkowski - Landlady; Robert Sickinger - Policeman; James Middleton - Iggie; Dick Lucas - Employment Agent
Mickey One (1965) is a surrealistic dramatic film starring Warren Beatty and directed by Arthur Penn from a script by Alan Surgal. Its kaleidoscopic camerawork, film noir atmosphere, lighting and design aspects, Kafkaesqueparanoia, philosophical themes and Warren Beatty's performance in the title role turned the film into a cult classic. Penn and Surgal ignored the usual conventions of narrative for a freewheeling approach to their dramatic devices and Chicago locations.
The film's soundtrack, reverberating with hints of everything from Béla Bartók to bossa nova, re-teamed Stan Getz with arranger Eddie Sauter, following their classic album Focus.[1]
After incurring the wrath of the Mafia, a stand-up comic (Warren Beatty) flees Detroit for Chicago, taking the name Mickey One. Eventually he returns to the stage, but is wary of becoming successful, afraid that he will attract too much attention. When he gets a booking at the upscale club Xanadu, he finds that his first rehearsal has become a special "audition" for an unseen man with a gruff voice. Paranoid that the mob has found him, Mickey runs away. He decides to find out who "owns" him and square himself with the mob, but he doesn't know what he did to anger them or what his debt is. Searching for a mobster who will talk to him, he gets beaten up by a bunch of nightclub doormen. Mickey finally concludes that it's impossible to get away and be safe, so he pulls himself together and does his act anyway.
In traveling about the city, Mickey continually sees a mute mime-like character known only as The Artist (Kamatari Fujiwara). The Artist eventually unleashes his Rube Goldberg-like creation, a deliberately self-destructive machine called "Yes", that is an hommage to the sculptor Jean Tinguely.[2]
As the first major Hollywood studio film to display an extensive influence from the New Wave in the cinematography and editing, Mickey One received a good send-off at the 1965 New York Film Festival, and Penn received a nomination for a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. However, critical reaction was mixed, and distribution was spotty, with the film arriving in some areas at drive-ins rather than first-run theaters, and it quickly vanished. Nevertheless, Beatty and Penn soon teamed again for Bonnie and Clyde in 1967.
The rediscovery of the film began in 1995 with a booking at San Francisco's Castro Theater and a reevaluation by Peter Stack:
Mickey One is, in essence, a jazz film with an edgy style in which shadings and tone of voice are everything. It is laced with American idioms in its script by Alan Surgal, and most of Beatty's lines have a smart-alecky tone. When he goes on the run, Mickey meets a woman who wonders who he is (since he can't shake his show-biz patina) and he hits her with the line: "I'm the king of silent movies hiding out till the talkies blow over." In another place he verbally assaults a nightclub owner who can't figure out why Mickey's so edgy, saying, "I'm guilty of not being innocent." At the start we see pretty-boy Beatty as a hot comic in Detroit. He's got it all -- good looks, the swagger of a deft improviser -- and he's having a torrid affair with a blond siren. (The film is filled with women bursting with desire). But fortune quickly turns -- witness to a torture murder in a back room, the comic flees, hoboes his way to Chicago's West Side and takes refuge in a junkyard. There he runs into another nightmarish scene -- police investigating a murder in an automobile crusher. The cinematic invention in Mickey One has been dismissed by some critics as contrivance. But Penn may have been decades ahead of his time in depicting an urban America as gallery of paranoia, cynicism and loneliness. In a classic scene, the comic is up against a brick wall auditioning at a nightclub, a single, powerful spotlight trained on him so he can't see into the audience. Penn creates an agonizing moment of a man talking awkwardly to God while looking as if he's standing before a firing squad.[3]
