I've wanted to see Mickey One (1965), but it was kind of hard to find. When it showed up on Amazon Prime, I still took a long while to watch it. I guess I thought it would be a homework movie. But one night, after I couldn't find any bad action or martial arts movies that appealed, I put it on.
Directed by Arthur Penn, it stars Warren Penn as a successful Detroit night club comic. We see him killing on stage, then drinking, driving his sports car, cuddling with a beautiful woman, and gambling. He also sees some mobsters besting some slob to death.
He wakes up the next morning and finds that he is in trouble with the mob. He figures he owes them for the gambling - maybe the girl got him drunk so he lost big. OK, so they'l start taking his pay, maybe leave him a little to live on. He asks his manager how much he's owes, and gets silence. A thousand? Ten, twenty? Silence. Was it the girl? Was she somebody's piece? Silence. How can he get out from under? Silence. He decides to run - his manager tells him he'll have to live like an animal.
So he destroys all his ID, hopes a train to Chicago. He jumps off near a junkyard, where he hears the police talk about the body found in a crushed car. Not really a body, just a smear. He keeps going, picks up a social securit card from a guy who has been mugged, Miklos Wunejeva. He takes it to an employment agency. They give him a disgusting job and tell him he'll be called Mickey One.
He saves his money, gets some clothes and a place to sleep. He meets a girl who falls for him - he may be down and out, but he's Warren Beatty. He starts checking out the clubs, watches a Dangerfield-type comic (Benny Dunn) and tops his act. The comic greets him as "Brother Rat!' - one of us.
Soon he's getting gigs at some decent clubs. But when the big clubs want to hire him, he's afraid he'll be recognized. But these men, like Hurd Hatfield aren't the type to take no for an answer.
This is all filmed in a noir/verite/New Wave style. There are touches of absurdity, especially a clown-like man (Katamari Fujiwara) who keeps silently geturing for Beatty to come with him - Beatty assumes it's a trap and ignores him. As far as jokes go, you get the feeling that Beatty is pretty corny, although people seem to go nuts for his act. We really only get a couple of routines. At one point, he tells his girl about his past, making terrible jokes about his terrible life. At the climax, he is alone on stagewith a spotlight on him, and he believes there is a gunman behind the it. He starts riffing: "Whos says I don't have to do this for a living? This sure gives you an appetite... to live!" etc.
So this is sort of a Godard pastiche, with a touch of Kurosawa (who suggested Fujiwara). It ends with Beatty trying to find any way to get to the mob to plead his case - or even to take his medicine. No one will give him an answer, like Man searching for God. Some call this pretentious. I guess it is, but I like New Wave, black-and-white existential and absurdist movies. So I liked it.
In conclusion, Beatty is often nasty and paranoid in the movie, This represents cocaine.
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