Mickey One

Mickey One is a strange film about a man on the run and living on the edge. Warren Beatty takes this new name after his business manager Franchot Tone tells him the mob has a contract on his life. At first Beatty can't figure it out. But it gradually dawns on him that he's been living it up high on the hog with the mob's money, $20,000.00 dollars of it. When Tone informs him of the tab, Beatty decides to run.

He lives for years in obscurity, but he's a performer with a compulsive need for an audience. Soon he's working at a swank joint in Chicago owned by Hurd Hatfield and Jeff Corey. But too much attention could bring him to the attention of people who don't forget.

Mickey One is a strange almost Kafkaesque type movie. It comes considerably short of being a classic. Still it's an interesting work and it has its following.

One other role of note is that of comedian Teddy Hart who plays Beatty's new found agent in Chicago. Hart was the brother of lyricist Larry Hart had a good career as a second banana comic. He's the short fellow with the rubbery expressive face.

Mickey One doesn't make it to the top tier, still it's an interesting work.

Like I knew this was gonna be a long night when I heard the west coast jazz opening. Penn obviously confused film making with Calvin Klein commercials. So, like Warren's in a tough spot--tough because he doesn't know what he did wrong--shades of Huntz hall being smacked in the head by Leo Gorcey--"Wha'd I do? Wha'd I do?" This causes the music to get louder and the camera to move jerkily, like my uncle's home movies. The puppet actors are forced to give us slabs of bad Brando, letting us know that ultimately the whole film is a waste of time. If I wanted to show angst and psychosis, I'd have taken camera and crew to the Motor Vehicle Bureau in Yonkers, and just alternated between the waiting dead, the agonizing number change on the electronic board and the sleepy indifference of the clerks. I wouldn't need no stinking music to scare or confuse. A half hour would be enough to send the audience screaming into the streets.

I had graduated Art School five years before this film was made, and agonized over predictable, gritty shots of litter and urban decay. It was "deja vu all over again!" There's a Ray Bradbury short story about a tourist in Mexico who sees an "interesting" crack in a wall of a house and asks the dweller to pose for a shot beside the crack...which he does by urinating.! "Mickey One" had a similar effect on me.

Took a couple of viewings to feel comfortable about this mid 60's predecessor to the days ahead of psychedelic imagery. But alas, it finally sunk in. Penn & Co. used a ton of artistic metaphors and graphic symbolism to buttress this supposedly straightforward plot theme. Basically, it's about a paranoid comedian (Beatty) on the run from the mob in Detroit who ends up several stops later in the heart of Chi-town. Probably the accent is on paranoid rather than comedian because he's not terribly funny, especially by today's standards. Regardless, he goes to a few bars to check out other comics and the bug bites him again and he is subsequently coaxed into doing his stand-up routine again. Beatty's erratic, hyped-up demeanor grated on me from time to time, but I have to assume that Mr. Penn had intended his lead character to exhibit these manic symptoms to blend in with the madcap sequences of events that were taking place during the course of the film.

But his journey is fraught with fear of getting discovered by the mob boys. When he first arrives in Chicago, he wanders into a scrap yard where heavy machinery smash up and compact old autos, apparently a metaphor by Penn to parallel Beatty's fear of getting smashed up and compacted by the mob! He then wanders into a salvation type mission where he encounters a stuttering evangelist who quotes Scripture, sounding like a vocal fusion of Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd. This minute or so sequence is far funnier than Beatty's "Mort Sahl-ish" dry-witted one-liners.

He meets up with a loving and sympathetic female (A. Stewart) who tries her best to keep him from teetering into the brink. On one of their walks through the city, they encounter a "mute" madcap character (K.Fujiwara) who has put together a surrealistic concoction of a Spike Jones type amalgamation of horns, pianos, drums noises, et al. It eventually blows up on him, whereupon the Fire Dept. comes to extinguish the resulting conflagration. All his work seems lost at that point except for one small gadget which still manages to work. The "mute" is delighted in saving that last gadget and is applauded by Beatty and his girl. I interpreted that to be a metaphor for Beatty's condition and how he should react to it: Whatever can happen will happen and not to worry because you never know what the end result may be, especially if you keep plugging away! Beatty then tries to find the mob guys who want him, gets his butt whooped in the process, and then finally goes on stage, bandages and all, and basically says, "I ain't scared any more, so if you want me here I am!", the final redemptive moment in the film. The ensuing fadeout is appropriately poignant.

To omit praising the likes of Hurd Hatfield, Jeff Corey, Franchot Tone, Teddy Hart, and the aforementioned Alexandra Stewart would be remiss. Their contributions were very interesting, at minimum. However, the main kudos go to Beatty, Penn and, last but not least, to Stan Getz for his masterful tenor sax interpretations. Someone needs to DVD (new verb?) this important period piece. Should be required viewing for young film makers, even if they don't like the movie!

As I recall, the movie got a lot of buzz on first release. After all, 1965 was decades into Hollywood's fixation on the commercially conventional, with linear narratives, explicit story lines, and happy endings with no loose threads. In short, just the kind of traditional story-telling that sent audiences home happy, reassured, and ready for more. So it's not surprising that many folks, of perhaps a more imaginative bent, were ready for something different. After all, art-house theatres were taking off with the likes of Ingmar Bergmann and the French New Wave. So along comes a movie like Mickey One with a very different Hollywood slant, and, by golly, it gets talked about, maybe more than it should have.

Seeing the concoction today, it strikes me as mainly a mess, perhaps more self-indulgent than honorable, but a mess in either case. Of course, it's harder to specify standards to judge arty films by than it is conventional films. After all, a critic's misgiving may amount more to critical oversight than to an absence of subtle profundity. I'll take that risk in saying that whatever the symbolism of Mickey's predicament, it's hard to care. And that's mainly because whatever the intended symbolism, it's too unstructured to invite interpretive inquiry. To me the movie's more a series of occasionally jarring visual effects than anything invitingly profound. It certainly doesn't help that actor Beatty is simply too callow to give Mickey's complex character a persuasive purchase. And since he's in about every scene, we're continually burdened with seeing the actor instead of the character.

Some folks look for an existential reading of whatever subtext there is (my impression is something about mysteries of original sin and freeing oneself from the overhang). So for those interested in existential themes, let me recommend Monte Hellman's 1965 Western, The Shooting. In my book, Hellman shows how a profound subtext can be combined with conventional story-telling, and in a way that may not be flashy, but is at least involving. All in all, it's no mystery to me why Mickey One, Two. or whatever has since drifted into obscurity, and in all likelihood, will stay there.

Director Arthur Penn and Star Warren Beatty were the team behind 'Bonnie And Clyde', a movie which literally exploded on to Hollywood screens in 1967, and caused some serious repercussions still being felt today. There's no argument from me that 'Bonnie And Clyde' is a milestone, and definitely a modern classic. But I have heard hardly anyone mention Penn and Beatty's previous collaboration 'Mickey One' released two years earlier. In its own way this movie is just as stunning, yet it is almost forgotten and unseen. I had been curious about the movie for some time and was ecstatic when I stumbled across an old VHS copy in my local video store (apparently it was never released on video in the US, this is certainly not the case here in Australia). I must say this was one of the most original and surprising movies I've ever seen. It reminded me in some ways of Boorman's 'Point Blank' and Seijun Suzuki's 'Tokyo Drifter' and 'Branded To Kill' ( all of which it predates by the way) in the way that it uses a genre crime film as an excuse for some mind-blowing visuals and ideas. 'Mickey One' shares a similar stylized surrealism and hip approach to the aforementioned, though they are all quite different films in other ways. Warren Beatty is an actor I have long lost interest in, but the movie reminds you of just how good he was in his heyday. The rest of the cast is eclectic and interesting and includes Canadian beauty Alexandra Stewart, veteran character actor Jeff Corey and an unforgettable appearance by Kamatari Fujiwara as an enigmatic performance artist in one of the movies most striking sequences. Beatty plays "The Comic" a wise-cracking comedian in the Lenny Bruce/Mort Sahl mold who finds himself on the run from the mob. He drifts along keeping an extremely low profile and doing odd jobs, before the lure of the stage proves to be too strong to ignore. He starts performing again under the name Mickey One, but as his reputation increases he becomes extremely paranoid wondering where/if/when his past will catch up to him with (presumably) fatal consequences. I see others who have seen this film have mentioned Kafka, others Fellini, and many have commented on the jazz influence (Sax legend Stan Getz is a featured soloist on the soundtrack). I can see what everyone is getting at, but those comparisons and the others I have made, really give you little idea of just how special and unique this movie is. If you get the opportunity to watch it please do so, as I believe you will be impressed. There are many contenders for "the great lost 1960s movie" and 'Mickey One' is as good as any. A truly remarkable movie that deserves to be rediscovered.