Mickey One is a 1965 film starring Warren Beatty and directed by Arthur Penn. Its kaleidoscopic camerawork, atmospheric noir lighting effects, surrealistic mise en scene, Kafkaesque paranoia, philosophical themes and Warren Beatty's performance in the title role turned the film into a cult classic.

The film's soundtrack, reverberating with hints of everything from Béla Bartók to bossa nova, re-teamed Stan Getz with arranger Eddie Sauter, following their classic album Focus.^[1]

A tingle of Tinguely

Penn and screenwriter Alan Surgal ignored the usual conventions of narrative for a freewheeling approach to their dramatic devices and Chicago locations. After incurring the wrath of the mob, a stand-up comic (Warren Beatty) flees Detroit for Chicago, taking the name Mickey One. As he returns to the stage and becomes successful, he fears the mob will track him down. He wishes to square himself with the mob but doesn't know what he did to anger them or what his debt is.

Traveling about the city, Mickey continually sees a mime-like character known only as The Artist (Kamatari Fujiwara). The Artist eventually unleashes his Rube Goldberg-like creation, a self-destructive machine that is an obvious tribute to the sculptor Jean Tinguely.^[2]

His paranoia is proved real as he confronts a local theatrical producer who agitatedly tells him to flee and provides him the money to do so, saying, "I don't want anything to do with this."

American New Wave

As the first major Hollywood studio film to display an extensive influence from the New Wave in the cinematography and editing, it got a good send-off at the 1965 New York Film Festival and Penn received a nomination for a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. However, critical reaction was mixed, and distribution was spotty, with the film arriving in some areas at drive-ins rather than first-run theaters, and it quickly vanished. Nevertheless, Beatty and Penn soon teamed again for Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

The rediscovery began in 1995 with a booking at San Francisco's Castro Theater and a reevaluation by Peter Stack:

Mickey One is, in essence, a jazz film with an edgy style in which shadings and tone of voice are everything. It is laced with American idioms in its script by Alan Surgal, and most of Beatty's lines have a smart-alecky tone. When he goes on the run, Mickey meets a woman who wonders who he is (since he can't shake his show-biz patina) and he hits her with the line: "I'm the king of silent movies hiding out till the talkies blow over." In another place he verbally assaults a nightclub owner who can't figure out why Mickey's so edgy, saying, "I'm guilty of not being innocent." At the start we see pretty-boy Beatty as a hot comic in Detroit. He's got it all -- good looks, the swagger of a deft improviser -- and he's having a torrid affair with a blond siren. (The film is filled with women bursting with desire). But fortune quickly turns -- witness to a torture murder in a back room, the comic flees, hoboes his way to Chicago's West Side and takes refuge in a junkyard. There he runs into another nightmarish scene -- police investigating a murder in an automobile crusher. The cinematic invention in Mickey One has been dismissed by some critics as contrivance. But Penn may have been decades ahead of his time in depicting an urban America as gallery of paranoia, cynicism and loneliness. In a classic scene, the comic is up against a brick wall auditioning at a nightclub, a single, powerful spotlight trained on him so he can't see into the audience. Penn creates an agonizing moment of a man talking awkwardly to God while looking as if he's standing before a firing squad.^[3]

References

External links

• ''Village Voice'': "Mickey One at MOMA" by J. Hoberman (April 15, 2008)