Currently playing in theaters is Mickey 17, a darkly funny sci-fi actioner from Oscar-winning filmmaker Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer, Parasite). Robert Pattinson stars as Mickey Barnes, an average guy on the run from a loan shark who takes a job helping to colonize a distant ice planet. Classified as an “expendable” and sent on potentially fatal missions, Barnes repeatedly dies and gets cloned, until the 17th incarnation–hence the title–manages to survive his latest assignment. Returning to base and encountering his already-activated replacement, the dual Mickeys question the nature of their shared identity as they fear elimination by the powerful boss behind the operation.
Playing in theaters 50 years ago was Mickey One, a darkly funny noir drama from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Arthur Penn (The Miracle Worker, Bonnie and Clyde). Warren Beatty stars as a stand-up comic on the run from the Mafia who assumes the identity of “Mickey One” and takes a series of menial jobs. Thinking he’s safe, “Mickey” is hired to perform at a sleazy café. But when his act catches the eye of an enigmatic nightclub owner, he fears any success will help the mobsters locate and eliminate him.
Now, Mickey One and Mickey 17, despite their names, are not the debut and latest installments of a long-running, heretofore unknown Hollywood franchise. And yet the pair have more than just similar titles linking them. As my slightly slanted synopses suggest, both films feature everyday antiheroes running afoul of enigmatic adversaries and getting caught up in dangerous situations that make each wonder about their sense of self. Our focus today, however, will be on Penn’s 1965 attempt to blend American film noir filmmaking with European cinematic sensibilities. Mickey One is an intriguing effort that caused rifts between the director and his star and perplexed the bosses at Columbia Pictures. Ignored by moviegoers at the time, in recent years it’s managed to achieve a cult status.
Top billed in what was his fifth film, Beatty plays a nameless Detroit comedian who appears to have it good, playing in posh Mob-owned clubs and spending his off-hours gambling and romancing various women. When he finds himself on the outs with his criminal employers for reasons unknown–maybe it was gambling debts, maybe it was stealing someone’s girl–Beatty takes off, burns all his identification, and hits the rails (“The ride was over. I was trapped.”).
Several years later, fugitive Beatty is shown hopping off a freight train near a Chicago auto graveyard. An encounter with a group of bums robbing an elderly man ends with him taking and using the Social Security card of the victim, whose lengthy Slavic name gets “Americanized” to Mickey One. “Mickey” lands a job hauling garbage in a restaurant, but eventually succumbs to the lure of the stage. He rents a tenement apartment in a Windy City ghetto of inebriates, stuttering evangelists, arcade sideshow workers, and trampoline instructors.
When his diminutive agent George (Teddy Hart) gets him an audition before the mysterious Mr. Castle (Hurd Hatfield), whose obsession with hiring the unknown comedian seems to hint at some ulterior motive, Mickey must decide whether to continue hiding in plain sight, fleeing again, or trying to find out how he can make amends with his possible pursuers. Adding to his problems is Jenny (Alexandra Stewart), a girl he may or may not have known in Detroit and who tries to talk him into staying. “Hiding from you don’t know who, for a crime you’re not even sure you’ve committed?,” she asks him, to which Mickey replies “And the only thing I know, I’m guilty.” “Of what are you guilty?” “Of not being innocent.”
To paraphrase Shelley Duvall in Annie Hall, watching Mickey One is really a Kafkaesque experience. Beatty’s self-assured entertainer at the start of the film is reduced to a constantly on the move, raw-nerved paranoiac trying desperately to stay one step ahead of a nameless, faceless antagonist. He’s not sure why anyone would be after him, but he can sense that they are. His audition for associates of Mr. Castle (another possible Kafka allusion) seems like a set-up and sends Mickey on a desperate quest to find out why the Mob wants him dead. The quest leads to a bizarre back-alley brawl featuring nightclub doormen dressed like a junior high Model U.N. and culminates with a return visit to the car-crushing lot.
While the script by Alan Surgal (who wrote for actual TV funnymen like Bob Hope and Red Skelton) tries to chronicle Mickey’s escalating sense of dread versus his desire to regain his on-stage popularity, it’s at times undercut by director Penn’s attempts to emulate the symbolism that marked French New Wave pictures of the time. The oddball denizens of Mickey’s Chicago demimonde, reminiscent of figures in Godard and Tati works, pop up with no rhyme or reason. One such scene occurs when Mickey and Jenny attend the unveiling of a mute junk peddler/artist’s (Kurosawa regular Kamatari Fujiwara) kinetic artwork, a Rube Goldberg-like contraption that catches fire. Adding to the film’s off-kilter feel is Eddie Sauter’s jazz-flavored soundtrack featuring improvisational pieces by sax legend Stan Getz.
While Mickey One was not well received by contemporary audiences and had faces frowning in Columbia’s boardroom, it also set Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty at each other’s throat more than once, according to the star himself. “We had a lot of trouble on that film, because I didn’t know what the hell Arthur was trying to do,” Beatty once said. “I’m not sure that he knew himself. To me, the stand-up gags that the guy had to do in Mickey One were not funny and that was always my complaint with Arthur.” These disagreements, of course, didn’t keep Beatty from turning to Penn two years later for another project, a ’30s-set gangster movie called Bonnie and Clyde. Coincidentally, Beatty would play another troubled entertainer who gets mixed up in dangerous goings-on when he and Dustin Hoffman teamed in the infamous 1987 box-office flop Ishtar.