The Essentials: Peter Bogdanovich’s 9 Best Films

Even anti-establishment, counter-cultural “revolutions,” such as the one that occurred in Hollywood throughout the 1970s, can become a hegemony of sorts. But in a time when iconoclasm became the norm for a brave new generation of young filmmakers, seemingly intent on outdoing each other in terms of finding not just new stories to tell but wholly new ways to tell them, Peter Bogdanovich stands slightly apart. Not because he was not part of that crew, that fabled Altman/Coppola/Friedkin/Ashby/De Palma/Scorsese/etc./etc. pantheon — he indisputably was. But because with Bogdanovich one seldom gets the sense that he wanted to rip into or tear down what had come before. He always wanted to build upon it, and always wore his unapologetic love of classical Hollywood cinema on his sleeve. In fact, many of his best films have a Janus-like aspect to them, partially of the moment, forward-looking, progressive, full of exuberance and an optimistic sense of the wide-open possibilities of the contemporary filmmaking landscape. But they also look back, overtly and admiringly, to the products of the very system he and his peers were responsible for largely dismantling.

This encyclopedic knowledge of, and encompassing love and nostalgia for, the filmmaking past is one of the things, along with his peerless craft and sly wit, that makes revisiting Bogdanovich’s films such a pleasure for the modern film critic. With the director himself having been a well-respected critic before he turned his hand to actual moviemaking, perhaps it’s only natural that he’s become kind of the poster boy for the cinephile-director, the filmmaker who is, indivisibly, a film lover too. But while, as a result of this, many of his films feature metatextual flourishes, in which Bogdanovich comments on contemporary filmmaking practices by referring to those of the past (think of “What’s Up, Doc?“‘ and how it reframes 1930/40s screwball tropes at the dawn of the sexual revolution of the 1970s, or the conscious aesthetic choice to shoot “The Last Picture Show” in anachronistic black and white, or “Targets“‘ overt clash between the old guard and the new), he is in many ways the least post-modern of filmmakers.

READ MORE: Interview: Peter Bogdanovich On ‘She’s Funny That Way’ And The Bodily Liquid Obsession Of Modern Comedy

There is a sincerity and a calm intelligence to the way he refers to classical tradition — he pays homage where lesser filmmakers might nod and wink for camp value. Far from deconstructing what went before, his is a cinema of reconstruction, in which his simple love for the films of Welles and Ford and Hawks colors everything he does and practically leaps off the screen into your lap. That he has been able to do that so often and so winningly without seeming derivative, and has along the way made several truly original outright masterpieces that stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the films he so admires, just goes to prove what an innate, natural filmmaker Bogdanovich is — he just happens to be one cinema’s most erudite students as well.

With his most recent movie, “She’s Funny That Way,” which stars Owen Wilson, Imogen Poots, Kathryn Hahn, Jennifer Aniston, and Will Forte opening in theaters this week (our review is here), here are our nine favorite Bogdanovich films as a timely reminder, if such were needed, of our blog-mate‘s particular, peculiar, and highly individual genius.

“Targets” (1968)
If Peter Bogdanovich’s first feature is not a great film it’s only because it’s really two films. One is a slightly anonymous Roger Corman cheapie, inventively shot by regular Bogdanovich collaborator Laszlo Kovacs (“Five Easy Pieces,” “Easy Rider“) and discomfitingly prescient in its plot, which sees an ordinary young man turn mass murderer, first at home, then as a highway sniper, then at a movie theater. But the director’s incipient talents and concerns are most served by the second storyline, in which Boris Karloff, who owed producer Corman two days’ work, plays Byron Orlock, a riff on Karloff himself — an aging star famous for playing Hammer Horror-style monsters. Corman’s only other stipulations (that the film come in on budget and use 20 minutes of footage from Karloff and Jack Nicholson-starrer “The Terror,” which became the film-within-the-film) mean Bogdanovich and co-writer Polly Platt had leeway to create something quite fascinating: a kind of double-feature-in-one-sitting. The shifts from one strand to the other feel jarring, but there’s also a certain energy released in these collisions — indeed throughout you can sense Bogdanovich’s palpable thrill at being behind a camera, and the relish with which he ascends a very steep learning curve. And yet there’s already nostalgia here too. “All the good films have already been made,” claims his onscreen character, Sammy Michaels (named in deference to Sam Fuller), as he covetously watches Howard Hawks‘ “The Criminal Code.” It’s a crisis of confidence brought about because Orlok, feeling old and irrelevant, has decided to retire before shooting Sammy’s passion project — because classic storytelling feels like it has no place in this confusing new world, where lumbering bogeymen have been replaced in the collective fear unconscious by Matt Damon-alike psychos whose bland exteriors carry no hint of the depravity beneath. Yet when the parallel storylines do finally converge in a brilliantly staged closing sequence, the old-school Orlok reduces the young, motiveless murderer to a snivelling wreck in a meta act of wish fulfillment, which is partially so satisfying because it so untrue: the ’70s were coming and Karloff’s generation was being batted aside with ease by Bogdanovich’s. With his very first film it feels like wanted to pay tribute to, and almost even grieve at the passing of that torch.