Amazon.com video review:
Medium Cool is an almost impossible oddity: director Haskel
Wexler
wanted to shoot a fictional, narrative film wherein actors mingled with
real people in an uncontrolled social environment. With that in mind, he
began filming a movie about racial tensions in Chicago during the weeks
prior to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, on the assumption that
there would be a riot there. Then he brought his cast, crew, and camera to
the scene of the proposed mayhem, and waited. . . and lo and behold, civil
disorder broke out. It's intensely strange to see actors, playing
characters, interacting in a real-life situation with real cops and real
hippies fighting and running about. This is made stranger still by the
story, about a reporter covering the growing unrest in the black ghettos of
the city who discovers that the FBI may be in cahoots with his network. In
preparing his script, Wexler assumed that the riot would be racial, but
in fact it turned out that most of the rioters were white, so the final
scenes seem to interrupt the narrative and make the film an odd
pastiche and a commentary on the lack of connection between politics and
life. Perhaps more of a curiosity than a wholly successful film, Medium
Cool is still worth seeing for its striking footage and
unprecedented combination of the real and the imaginary. --James
DiGiovanna
