Cinema: The Big Gamble

Mickey One. “I’m guilty of not being innocent,” says the piano-playing nightclub comic, Warren Beatty. On the lam in Chicago under an unpronounceable alias shortened to “Mickey One ” he is convinced that he is going to be rubbed out by an unnamed mob because of a gambling debt. “I owe somebody a fortune,” he insists, though the debt he owes appears to be the price that an affluent modern society exacts for such bounties as money, success, fame, women, fast cars and all the rest of it.

In this admirably ambitious drama Director Arthur Penn (The Miracle Worker) has given rein to his desire “to push American movies into areas in which Fellini and Truffaut have moved.” Penn’s talent often seems equal to the task, for he has taken Hollywood’s old formula for a gangland chase melodrama and refashioned it as a hip morality play, alive with razzle-dazzle cinematic techniques. He also conquers what appears to be a serious case of miscasting, coaxing from Actor Beatty a snappishly smooth performance that should raise him permanently from the ranks of man-tanned juveniles. Unhappily, such peripheral successes do not save the movie from failure. Mickey One is never boring but never very precise, and finally goes to pieces amidst the crash of its own symbols: a clawing crane in an auto junkyard (a favored setting for filmmakers) has a threatening contemporary look, as do assorted Mafia types and an omnipresent Oriental who in one sequence presides over a self-destroying fireworks display, pegging himself as a survivor of, say, Hiroshima. In their all-encompassing, cleverly arranged handipak of 20th century fears, Penn and Scenarist Alan Surgal strive for an art film of Kafkaesque dimension, but they emerge like masscult tourists showing off with a Kodak.