Pity the premature revolutionary. In a different, kinder world, what we now know as the ballsy, risk-taking Hollywood of the late ’60s and ’70s would have begun with an artsy, intense, somewhat pretentious French New Wave-inspired drama directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty. That might seem a little odd, considering what we now know as the ballsy, risk-taking Hollywood of the late ’60s and ’70s did begin with an artsy, intense, somewhat pretentious French New Wave-inspired drama directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty. That film, of course, was 1967’s Bonnie And Clyde, a game-changing classic about outlaws who accidentally becomes entertainers in a world where bank robbers doubled as folk heroes. But it could also have kicked off with a different artsy, intense, somewhat pretentious French New Wave drama directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty, this time about an entertainer who accidentally becomes an outlaw: 1965’s Mickey One.
Mickey One is one of the great what-ifs of American film. What if this were the film that started it all? What if American audiences lustily embraced a film that didn’t just borrow from the visual vocabulary of the French New Wave but actually looked and felt like it could have been made by Jean-Luc Godard (who was bandied about as a potential director of Bonnie And Clyde) as a follow-up to Breathless? What if the French New Wave was imported to these shores and exploded into the mainstream in an unusually pure and direct form, instead of via the New Wave mannerisms of Bonnie And Clyde?
We will never know, as audiences and critics alike didn’t quite know what to make of Mickey One. Actually, audiences and critics had no fucking idea what to make of the film. The film opened to violently mixed reviews and paltry box office. (It didn’t help that it was dumped into drive-ins in selected markets instead of art-houses.) Imagine how jarring it must have been to watch this trailer in 1965.
Stateside audiences hip to the Cahiers Du Cinema gang and their wildly influential aesthetic must have found the film awfully familiar, even if Mickey One looked and felt like no American film before it. Mickey One throws down the gauntlet with an opening-credits sequence that tells us everything we need to know about the title character—a glib, handsome, but fundamentally talentless and amoral stand-up comic played by Beatty—and the world he inhabits without a single line of dialogue. With little in the way of grounding, we’re thrown into a shadowy underground nighttime world that’s sexy, tawdry, and dangerous, the kind of place where thoughtless words or an untoward look at the wrong dame can lead to a one-way trip to fist city or a bullet in the brain.
Mickey One is awash in the iconography of ’60s cool: It has a hep jazz score highlighted by Stan Getz’s saxophone, a dashing, too-cool-for-school lead, and atmospheric black-and-white cinematography by Robert Bresson collaborator Ghislain Cloquet that transforms Chicago into a grimy urban wasteland. It’s a world of bright lights and sordid glamour ruled by mobsters and populated by molls, kept women, and good-looking jokers. Musicians are kept as pets by men in power as long as they stay in line and don’t overstep their boundaries. The rub is that no one quite seems to know where those lines are drawn or what happens when they’re transgressed, least of all Beatty, who is shocked and deeply disturbed to learn that his mob bosses in Detroit are intent on punishing him, preferably by death, for mysterious transgressions.
Mickey One shares with the work of Franz Kafka and the French New Wave a pervasive fatalism wedded to paranoia and free-floating dread. We never do learn conclusively why the mob is after Beatty, though we pick up plenty of hints; and from the cavalier, cocky manner Beatty handles himself, it’s easy to understand why sausage-fingered mobsters in ill-fitting suits wouldn’t want the glib charmer in the same area code as their dames. Beatty isn’t being punished for any specific sin so much as he’s being punished for who he is, for his attitude, swagger, and devil-may-care bravado. He’s being persecuted for being too cool. So Beatty goes on the lam, shedding his slick old identity to ride the rails and blend in with the suffering masses. A man accustomed to being the center of attention suddenly wants to slip out of his skin.
Penn and his brilliant cinematographer surround Beatty with gargoyle-faced grotesques that make his callow beauty stand out in even sharper relief. Beatty isn’t just prettier than everyone else; he’s a beacon of beauty in a cesspool of ugliness. Penn shoves his camera so far into the supporting cast’s mugs that you can practically count the nose hairs on the homely men cackling maniacally at Beatty. The film’s jittery rhythms and casual surrealism render everything creepy and borderline grotesque. The nightclub audience watches Beatty’s hacky routines rapaciously, devouring him with their eyes. Their laughter becomes mocking and foreign rather than reassuring.