Mickey One (1965)

Film: Mickey One (1965)

Stars: Warren Beatty, Alexandra Stewart, Hurd Hatfield, Franchot Tone, Kamatari Fujiwara

Director: Arthur Penn

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

We have not yet done an English language film from the neo-noir era this year, and since we are officially at the end of the month (this is our final film-thanks for following along!), I'm going to get one in under the buzzer.  Mickey One, though, doesn't feel particularly American.  Made in 1965 for Columbia, it starred a big name in Hollywood at the time, albeit one that wasn't as big as he would be two years later.  Warren Beatty, along with his director from this picture Arthur Penn, would redefine Hollywood movies two years later with Bonnie and Clyde, but Mickey One is barely discussed today, and it's honestly more akin to the French New Wave than the other American movies of its era, even other neo-noir of the early-to-mid-1960's.  The film is at once ahead of its time, and perhaps also, not of any time, it's such an oddity in the noir genre.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is narratively about Mickey One (Beatty), a standup comic who has made the mafia angry, though it's not entirely clear why (this becomes a key point in a scene later in the picture where Beatty argues with Oscar nominee Franchot Tone, this being his penultimate big-screen role).  He moves to Chicago, and there he falls in love with a woman named Jenny (Stewart), but is afraid of being too successful as a comic under an assumed name, realizing that if he becomes well-known the mafia will come after him.  He fouls up an audition arranged for him by a talent scout of sorts (played by Hurd Hatfield), mostly because he's too scared of the man behind the light, thinking that he's trying to kill him.  The film ends with him finally giving up, realizing that he can't run forever, so he might as well at least try to make his act a success again.

That's the plot of the movie, but it's not really the driving force behind it.  Penn's picture is roughly edited, frequently splicing together scenes in a seemingly intentional manner (given that Penn would make a movie as fine as Bonnie and Clyde, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that this was a stylistic choice rather than just bad editing), and feels like it's supposed to be ambiguous.  There are aspects of this I like.  I loved the way that we get a French New Wave film by way of Fellini (Kamatari Fujiwara plays a modernist sculptor that would've felt very much at home in Nights of Cabiria or 8 1/2), and I think it smartly plays into the paranoia that would be mined so well in the 1970's in movies like Chinatown and Penn's own Night Moves (maybe the two best neo-noirs of the decade?), showing that you can't trust anyone, even if in the case of Mickey One, it's not clear if anyone is out to get you.  It looks good (solid cinematography), and I loved the jazzy soundtrack.

But while there are a lot of good ideas on display here, the film itself does not gel.  This is blasphemy coming from me as I love him as an actor, but Warren Beatty is maybe miscast?  He's too beautiful, and he's not a particularly funny comic (it's not clear if he's supposed to be talented or not, which is a problem for the story), and he doesn't inhabit the paranoia in the way that someone like his buddy Jack Nicholson would've at the time.  I feel like he gets lost in the movie, and while he looks the part of a French New Wave leading man, it doesn't work.  None of the performances are that strong, though, to be honest.  Hurd Hatfield is the best, but I don't think he knows what his part is supposed to be, and the sexual tension between he and Beatty feels wasted (it's possible Penn never even noticed it).  Critics at the time called the film pretentious, and honestly-they're not wrong, even if time would show that Penn had good ideas, but he wouldn't be able to hone them until he had seen an America ripped apart by Vietnam and Watergate.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Born to Kill, Brighton Rock, Brute Force, Call Northside 777, Caught, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Cry Wolf, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, The Naked City, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, Side Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach, A Woman's Secret

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Big Knife, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, Julie, Kansas City Confidential, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps, Whirlpool

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Lost Highway, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai, Shoot the Piano Player