Grok My Enthusiasm (43)

By: Brian Berger
November 2, 2016

One in a weekly series of enthusiastic posts contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars.

It’s one of the greatest and most effective of all movie themes, so let’s start there: an instrumental titled “Emotions” from the first Love album (March 1966), Johnny Echols guitar. That this moody masterpiece has, for reasons of corporate intransigence, never been credited in Medium Cool (August 1969) affectingly encapsulates the brilliance of a picture so dense with action, allusion and invention, that the more closely one watches, the more astonishing it becomes. If director Haskell Wexler exceeds all praise but gratitude for this work, so too does the film’s editor, Verna Fields.

Take this sequence, starting at about 23 minutes, when, with no foreshadowing, the film leaves the Chicago apartment of a young Appalachian mother (the ineffable Verna Bloom) and her adolescent son (Harold Blankenship) via jump cut to:

* The film’s protagonist, TV reporter and cameraman John Casellis (Robert Forster) stepping from a gracious hotel into a waiting station wagon. CUT:

* To the middle of protest rally, mixed black and white, the crowd chanting, “This may be the last time…” CUT: to Jesse Jackson atop a small podium, fist raised. CUT: Casellis and his sound man, Gus (Peter Bonerz) briefly pass through the crowd. CUT: The chanting continues with a close-up of only Casellis’ and Gus’ boots before a CUT to their tromping through the mud, the Washington Monument in both the hazy distance and steps away in puddled reflection.

Again, the film has identified nothing — but this is Resurrection City, the Washington D.C. protest encampment, begun in May 1968 by the Poor People’s Campaign following the assassination of Martin Luther King. “This may be the last time but I don’t know!” Fast dissolve to:

* An industrial kitchen with mostly black and Latino workers. It could be anywhere but moments later, an unseen but instantly recognizable voice. “And I would hope, now that the California primary is over…” It’s Senator Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, shortly after midnight following the Democratic primary of Tuesday June 4, 1968. A slow terror unfolds in this recognition, matched by Wexler’s slow panning around the kitchen, men and women stoic in their tasks. “And now it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there!” Unseen, the crowd is chanting “We want Bobby! We want Bobby!” An entry door bursts open, a press of bodies rushing towards — JUMP CUT:

* Back to Washington, where camera scaffolds stand outside the Lincoln Memorial and Wexler’s camera pulls away to the Mothers of Invention song “Oh No”:

Oh no
I don’t believe it
You say that you think you know
The meaning of love
You say love is all we need
You say
With your love you can change
All of the fools
All of the hate
I think you’re probably
Out to lunch

Recorded in the winter of 1967/68, which is to say before the two murders made Frank Zappa’s cynicism that much more terribly accurate.

***

MORE MOVIES at HILOBROW: KLUTE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: 25 neo-noirs of the Sixties (1964–1973) | James Parker’s BOURNE VARIATIONS series | Alix Lambert’s SÉRIE NOIRE series | Jacob Mikanowski’s SCREEN TIME series | Josh Glenn’s SHOCKING BLOCKING series | Joanne McNeil’s ALL MY STARS series | MORE: including dozens of HILO HERO items on movie directors and actors.

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Grok My Enthusiasm (43)

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