It Was 50 Years Ago Today: ‘Mickey One’
October 6, 1965
Mickey One
#1 film at the US box office, October 1-7, 1965
The rise of television in the late ’50s and early ’60s spelled trouble for the film industry. Faced with declining ticket sales, Hollywood fired back with spectacle, the kind that would outdo anything on a 13” black-and-white screen: lavish Technicolor musicals, 3D experiments, widescreen epics with casts of thousands. But as the films grew bigger, they also grew more expensive. As a result, storytelling and visual styles grew increasingly conservative in order to avoid alienating viewers who might be put off by anything experimental or risqué.
It wasn’t just Hollywood that was stuck, however. France, still struggling to recover from the economic impact of World War II, also found its film industry trending toward a safe, old-fashioned “cinema of quality.” These movies, often adaptations of classic literature, were guaranteed to earn a certain level of critical respect and return on financial investment without threatening to push the artistic envelope. In protest, a group of film critics from the journal Cahiers du cinéma decided to make their own films, launching the movement known as the French New Wave. These movies were low in budget but high on style, creativity, and intellectual ideas.
Films like Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), an unromanticized depiction of a troubled childhood, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), an elliptical crime story with philosophizing protagonists, impressed American cinephiles when they landed on US shores. The restrictive Motion Picture Production Code, however, prevented Hollywood movies from matching the moral complexity, edgy themes, and overt sexuality of their French counterparts — at least at first. By the mid-’60s, the old studio system was falling apart, and the tight grip of the Production Code had begun to slacken. Meanwhile, the influence of European cinema and the burgeoning American independent movement were beginning to trickle into mainstream Hollywood productions.
The first major studio film to bear obvious influence from the French New Wave was 1965’s Mickey One — and even that more or less slipped through the cracks. Director Arthur Penn, coming off the success of 1962’s awards magnet The Miracle Worker, signed a two-movie deal with Columbia Pictures allowing him to make any property he wanted, so long as it cost under a million dollars. Penn persuaded up-and-coming star Warren Beatty, then best known as the romantic lead of 1961’s Splendor in the Grass, to star in a flashy, daring tribute to the French New Wave, film noir, and Franz Kafka. Beatty plays a Detroit-based stand-up comic who suddenly finds himself on the run from the mob with no clue as to what they want him for or how he can set things right. In Chicago, he adopts the alias Mickey One (shortened from a Polish name on a stolen ID) and, despite his attempts at anonymity, finds himself sucked back into the spotlight. Mickey’s talent proves a burden, as his struggles to lay low conflict with the higher-profile gigs pushed on him. Ultimately, he becomes a victim of his own success.
Much as the British Invasion built on the foundation of American rock ‘n’ roll, the French New Wave reinterpreted and recontextualized the American tradition of film noir. (In fact, it was the Cahiers crew who gave the genre its name.) So while Mickey One’s basic premise could have been ripped from a Hollywood movie made a decade or so earlier, its existentialist underpinnings and roundabout approach to narrative bear the influence of the French, specifically Truffaut’s 1960 film Shoot the Piano Player (about a dive bar pianist who crosses paths with gangsters).
One of the most striking ways Mickey One borrows from the French New Wave is in the impressionistic use of editing: not necessarily aiming for strict chronological continuity or narrative flow, but to conjure up a certain mood. Sudden cuts omit the connective tissue within and between scenes with the expectation that the audience is sophisticated enough to fill in the blanks on their own. The use of jump cuts also gives the film a breathless pace matching Mickey’s frantic run from whatever is pursuing him. (One scene spoofs the French New Wave’s affinity for jump cuts by flickering between shots of Beatty and actress Alexandra Stewart literally jumping up and down.) Another editing technique juxtaposes the audio from one scene over the visuals of another one, striking unexpected parallels between the two.
While Mickey One is less overtly philosophical than much of the French New Wave, there is an existentialist strain in its depiction of a man discovering that he can neither know his fate nor do anything to stop it. A recurring theme in the movie finds Mickey witnessing scenes of violent destruction — cars getting crushed in a junkyard compactor, an elaborate art piece rigged to explode itself — as if observing the brutal end that awaits him (and, by extension, everyone). But don’t be thrown by this rather stark description: Mickey One is decidedly a comedy with a surprisingly goofy sense of humor, even if its biggest joke is life itself.
Columbia Pictures despised the project from its inception, but Penn’s contract forced the studio to produce and distribute it against its better judgment. (Promotion tended to focus on Eddie Sauter’s jazzy soundtrack, featuring sax improvisations by Stan Getz, over the movie itself.) Beatty’s star power pushed Mickey One atop the box office for a single week during a low-competition season, but its self-conscious artiness, disjointed narrative, and surreal ending were received with general bafflement. Columbia quickly pushed the film from mainstream cinemas to drive-ins and other low-rent venues, where it was soon forgotten. Even today, it’s never been officially released on home video. (I rented it from iTunes for this piece; it also occasionally turns up on streaming sites like Hulu and Crackle.)
In recent years, however, Mickey One has gained a new-found appreciation among cinephiles for being ahead of its time, foreshadowing more lasting changes to the movie industry just around the corner. Penn and Beatty’s next collaboration, 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, was not only an Oscar-nominated box office hit, but is also widely credited as the movie that started the New Hollywood movement. The success of Bonnie and Clyde opened doors for such groundbreaking films as The Graduate and Easy Rider, as well as for auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Robert Altman to change the face of mainstream cinema. Bonnie and Clyde benefited from being a more polished film, with a more popular subject, released at a more favorable time, as American culture was rapidly growing more open and permissive. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine that it would have happened without Mickey One, the petri dish where the innovations of the French New Wave could cross with a distinctly American point of view.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
