Medium Cool

John Cassellis is a television news cameraman. He and his sound recorder dispassionately film images of car accidents rather than help the victims. Cassellis is seemingly hardened to ethical and social issues; he is more concerned with his personal life and pursuing audience-grabbing stories. Yet once Cassellis finds out that his news station has been providing the stories and information gathered by the cameramen and news journalists to the FBI, he becomes enraged. The news station creates an excuse to fire him, but he soon finds another job free-lancing at the Democratic National Convention.

In the course of his television job, Cassellis meets Eileen, a single mother, and her son, Harold, who have moved from West Virginia to Chicago. Harold tells a woman canvassing the neighborhood that his father, Buddy, is "at Vietnam", but later tells Cassellis that he just took off one day and never came back. Eileen tells Cassellis that "Buddy is dead." Cassellis grows fond of them both, mother and son.

When Harold goes missing, Eileen goes to the site of the convention to ask Cassellis for help. She finds herself in the midst of the riots. After witnessing acts of police brutality, Eileen finds Cassellis. As they drive to an undisclosed location, unaware that Harold has returned home, Cassellis accidentally crashes the car into a tree, killing Eileen and critically injuring himself. A passing driver stops to photograph the accident, after which he leaves the heavily damaged car behind.

• Robert Forster as John Cassellis
• Verna Bloom as Eileen
• Peter Bonerz as Gus
• Marianna Hill as Ruth
• Harold Blankenship as Harold
• Charles Geary as Harold's father
• Sid McCoy as Frank Baker
• Christine Bergstrom as Dede
• Peter Boyle as Gun clinic manager
• China Lee as Roller derby patron

The title comes from Marshall McLuhan's work in which he described TV as a "cool" medium. The "cooler" the medium, "the more someone has to uncover and engage in the media" in order to "fill in the blanks." The film questions the role and responsibilities of television and its newscasts.

The music in the film was assembled by guitarist Mike Bloomfield (Haskell Wexler's cousin). The film features contemporary music from the early Mothers of Invention albums by rock musician Frank Zappa, as well as the Love instrumental "Emotions" over the opening credits and as a recurring theme. Wexler has said the scene under the opening credits with the bike messenger delivering film to the television station was inspired by Jean Cocteau's film, Orpheus.

Harold Blankenship, who played the young boy Harold in Medium Cool, was tracked down by filmmaker Paul Cronin (who made the documentary Look out Haskell, it's real) and appears in Cronin's film Sooner or Later. Blankenship named his first son after Haskell Wexler.

Shot at a time of great social and political counterculture upheaval in the United States, Wexler's film reflects the conflicted nature of a country divided by issues of race, gender, poverty, crime, and war. Such themes were touched upon by more mainstream films such as Getting Straight and The Strawberry Statement, but Wexler's treatment was considered highly controversial – the Motion Picture Association of America film rating system gave it an 'X' rating. The censors "objected to the language and the nudity", Wexler said later; "What no one had the nerve to say was that it was a political 'X'".[3] In 1970 the film was re-rated 'R'.[4]

Much critical response to Medium Cool focused around the revolutionary techniques of combining fact and fiction rather than the plot of the film. In his 1969 review, Roger Ebert wrote "In Medium Cool, Wexler forges back and forth through several levels...There are fictional characters in real situations...there are real characters in fictional situations".[5] While Ebert did not find the plot to be particularly innovative, he acknowledged that Wexler purposely left it up to his audience to fill in the gaps of the romance, and at the same time presented images of great political significance. Ultimately, Ebert credited Wexler with masterfully combining multiple levels of filmmaking to create a film that is "important and absorbing".[5] Ebert placed the film second on his list of the 10 best pictures of 1969.[6]

Similarly, in his 1969 review of the film for The New York Times, Vincent Canby credits Wexler with presenting his audience with powerful imagery through the use of documentary filmmaking techniques. He wrote that Medium Cool was "an angry, technically brilliant movie that uses some of the real events of last year the way other movies use real places — as backgrounds that are extensions of the fictional characters."[7] Like Ebert, Canby pointed out that the political atmosphere of the film fills in the blanks left open by a relatively superficial plot. Furthermore, Canby noted the film's historical significance: "The result is a film of tremendous visual impact, a kind of cinematic Guernica, a picture of America in the process of exploding into fragmented bits of hostility, suspicion, fear and violence."[7] Like Ebert, Canby felt that the real significance of the film was in its capturing of a specific political situation rather than its conventional success through plot and character development. Canby wrote: "Medium Cool is an awkward and even pretentious movie, but... it has an importance that has nothing to do with literature."[7]

• List of American films of 1969
• Prologue, a 1970 Canadian film that also blends cinéma vérité-style documentary and fiction, set against the Democratic National Convention

• Medium Cool at IMDb
• Medium Cool at Rotten Tomatoes
• 'Look out Haskell, it's real': The Making of Medium Cool, a 2001 documentary about Medium Cool
• Medium Cool: Preserving Disorder an essay by Thomas Beard at the Criterion Collection