'Medium Cool': 1969 masterpiece is stunning portrait of an era

Medium Cool

I first saw Haskel Wexler's seminal 1969 masterpiece Medium Cool in a high school film class taught by an aging hippie with a grey pony tail.

Most of my peers and I knew the film's star, Robert Forster, from his Oscar-nominated role in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown and the police riot during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago (which provides the backdrop for the film) was definitely not on our radar.

The movie definitely made an impression on me then, although I didn't fully appreciate how daring and conceptually brilliant it was when I was a teenager.

Now that I am better informed -- on film and history -- I can see Medium Cool for what it is, one of the great films of the 1960s, which along with better known landmarks like Bonnie & Clyde helped usher in the great film-making boom of the 1970s.

It's a film about media and television when both entities were modernizing in new and frightening ways. You would think this dates the film, but the points being made by the characters on-screen actually resonate perfectly with today's climate.

It uses a thin, but touching plot about a TV cameraman who engages in a tentative romance with a poor single mother, raising a young boy in Chicago's slums to tell a larger story about the tensions between black and white, the impoverished and the more affluent, and the hip and the square.

Wexler was somehow able to get real footage of Chicago police doing drills with costumed fake protesters in preparation for a clash later in the week. In another stirring sequence, he captures the best summation of black paranoia about white people (and vice versa) that I may have ever seen in a movie.

Robert Forster in Medium Cool

I have no idea how this movie performed commercially -- I can't even believe it was ever made or got released by a major studio (Paramount Pictures). But of course the late '60s and early '70s was a very radical time in Hollywood.

Medium Cool is an overtly progressive movie, but also a cynical one. Whenever it seems to meander into maudlin territory something dark and unexpected happens that is genuinely surprising.

For instance, in one of my favorite scenes, Forster and the luminous Verna Bloom watch footage of Martin Luther King Jr.'s legendary "Mountaintop" speech (the last one he ever gave).

We never see it, we only hear it but MLK's soaring voice still retains all its power. For a while the two characters/actors listen intently and we assume reverently. Suddenly, Forster says "I love shooting film." Such a great line and a really telling moment in a movie that's full of them: the cameraman is a dispassionate observer, a mere extension of the machine he operates.

Yet Forster's character is both a critic and participant in the burgeoning multimedia apparatus. He longs to report on intriguing real-life stories (such as a black cabbie who is chastised after returning $10,000 he finds in his car) but in the first scene in the movie he can be seen callously filming a car wreck before calling for help.

This movie really affected me because I had just come from a visit to the MLK center in Atlanta, had just finished reading the book Subversives (which explores FBI and conservative suppression of dissent on the Berkeley campus in the'60s) and recently watched the legendary film Z, which also uses real-life events to infuse its narrative about an assassination plot in Greece.

These all are works that are really attempting to say something and stir an activist spirit within their viewers, something you almost never seen in mainstream movies anymore. The closet I feel like we've come was 2004's polemic Fahrenheit 9/11, directed by Michael Moore. That was a movie that really aggressively tried to serve as a call to action.

Medium Cool isn't quite as earnest and its uncompromisingly twisted ending suggests a less-than-optimistic outlook on the American condition, yet its boundless creativity and unpredictable rhythms kept me entranced and inspired.