Targets' unbearable tension can largely be attributed to its ruthlessly bifurcated structure, as the story cross-cuts between an old movie actor's (Boris Karloff, essentially playing himself) moody reflections about changing times and a clean-cut young adult's inexplicable rampage. It's a disarming storytelling strategy that Hitchcock would have loved: one half thoughtful and talky; the other half suspenseful and purely visual. The sniping sequences are among the most harrowing ever filmed, with Bogdanovich forcing us to peer down the sniperscope while the killer picks off hapless targets. Topical then as it certainly is now, the story was based on Charles Whitman's then-recent killing spree in Texas, and the film was released contemporaneous to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Thompson (Tim O'Kelly) is the disaffected youth, still living in his childhood home with his wife and parents. He has an insurance job, smiles a lot, prays at dinner, and drives around with a small arsenal in his trunk. We know it's only a matter of time until he snaps and Bogdanovich mercilessly teases that anticipation by cutting back to Karloff's story at the queasiest moments, such as when O'Kelly grabs a handgun from his trunk after his parents have gone to bed, re-enters the house, switches off the lights behind him, and the black screen transitions into a television presentation of Howard Hawks's The Criminal Code, which Karloff is viewing in his hotel room.
Editing and scene construction are just as meticulous throughout: a shot preceding the murder of Thompson's family begins with a big close-up on the word "DIE.", and after the massacre, itself reliant on montage for effect, the camera tracks along the carpet until it stops on the letter that O'Kelly was finishing as the scene began. Bogdanovich tempers these punishing sequences with cathartic doses of classic-movie love, e.g., the aforementioned Hawks' film ("all the good movies have been made," laments Bogdanovich's director character), but also Karloff's unforgettable campfire tale, ostensibly told to an obnoxious radio-show host but addressed to us, his faithful public. These moments function as respites in the narrative, but also, crucially, as needed escapes from the incomprehensible brutality of current times, restorative plunges into nostalgia. The movie comes down to a collision of past and present (fiction and reality) that gives Karloff one final show-stopping act, recalling an earlier moment in The Criminal Code and cleverly matching his concurrent actions in the real-life film-within-a-film, The Terror. It is to Bogdanovich's credit that such heady self-reflexivity never distracts but is adeptly woven into the story to make a statement about cinema's place in the present.
Editing and scene construction are just as meticulous throughout: a shot preceding the murder of Thompson's family begins with a big close-up on the word "DIE.", and after the massacre, itself reliant on montage for effect, the camera tracks along the carpet until it stops on the letter that O'Kelly was finishing as the scene began. Bogdanovich tempers these punishing sequences with cathartic doses of classic-movie love, e.g., the aforementioned Hawks' film ("all the good movies have been made," laments Bogdanovich's director character), but also Karloff's unforgettable campfire tale, ostensibly told to an obnoxious radio-show host but addressed to us, his faithful public. These moments function as respites in the narrative, but also, crucially, as needed escapes from the incomprehensible brutality of current times, restorative plunges into nostalgia. The movie comes down to a collision of past and present (fiction and reality) that gives Karloff one final show-stopping act, recalling an earlier moment in The Criminal Code and cleverly matching his concurrent actions in the real-life film-within-a-film, The Terror. It is to Bogdanovich's credit that such heady self-reflexivity never distracts but is adeptly woven into the story to make a statement about cinema's place in the present.