Warming To MEDIUM COOL

Robert Forster in MEDIUM COOL, 1969

I've always been only mildly enthusiastic about Haskell Wexler's seminal MEDIUM COOL, mostly because of the way it begins and ends, but Criterion's new Blu-ray knocked it into sharper focus for me. Influenced by the political Sixties cinema of Jean-Luc Godard and Norman Mailer's then-hot-off-the-presses "nonfiction novel" THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT, it features Robert Forster (JACKIE BROWN) as a Chicago TV news cameraman who becomes increasingly aware of how the US government and Big Business were using the media to distract and control an increasingly demonstrative public at the height of the Vietnam war, and who essentially finds his humanity in a relationship with an Appalachian woman (Verna Bloom) and her son (Harold Blankenship) at the time of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The actors are shown interacting with history on the convention floor and outside in Lincoln Park where hundreds of peaceful demonstrators were beaten back by police, armored vehicles and jeeps outfitted with barbed wire bumpers. Seen today, MEDIUM COOL resonates like an old bulletin that still carries surprising heat; it manages to be both firmly rooted in its time and awfully aware of what's just around the corner. It not only foresees Kent State but the ending of EASY RIDER, which followed it into theaters only one month later.

Criterion has given it a spectacular, razor-sharp presentation, with two illuminating commentaries and a host of supplements -- including two lengthy excerpts from two documentaries by editor Paul Cronin, one about the making of MEDIUM COOL and the other a heartbreaking 15m from a work-in-progress about the film's affecting young Appalachian actor Harold Blankenship. The soundtrack, credited to Mike Bloomfield (whose group The Electric Flag had previously scored Roger Corman's THE TRIP) and featuring Paul Butterfield, was tampered with on previous home video incarnations but is intact here. It includes some scattered early Frank Zappa/Mothers of Invention  tracks, including slightly different acetates (you can hear the crackles) of two songs from the then-as-yet-unreleased WE'RE ONLY IN IT FOR THE MONEY, whose lyrical content shows that Wexler was not the only artist aware that the Summer of Love was on a collision course with reality.