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Wexler is at his best portraying the cameraman as both observer and instigator. His Brechtiari fascination with the mechanics of illusion culminates in a shot of himself behind his camera, turning and focusing on the audience. He is also better than any first-time director has a right to be with actors. Out of a cast of unknowns and little-knowns, he has extracted the kind of forcefully realistic performances that Kazan might envy. Robert Forster is all crude nervous energy and Verna Bloom, looking like the kind of bucolic beauty city boys dream about, is simultaneously more deeply talented and unaffectedly sexy than any new actress in recent memory. A young nonprofessional named Harold Blankenship makes an extraordinary debut as the widow's 13-year-old son, and Peter Bonerz, playing a timid soundman, turns in the sort of performance that can win a man a supporting Oscar.
Because of all its strengths and despite several pronounced weaknesses, Medium Cool marks the extraordinary debut of a 47-year-old director and signals perhaps a new boldness in American cinema.
At one time or another, Haskell Wexler's passion for independence has taken him around every point of the professional compass—and occasionally a couple of thousand feet off the ground. His mother still shudders when she recalls sitting on the lawn of her suburban-Chicago home and watching her 17-year-old son come flying over in a single-engine Ercoupe, Bolex camera pressed tightly to his eye as he dangled by his legs out the cabin door.
Wexler, who likes to do things the hard way, has spent the better part of his 15-year career tilting with unions, censors and moneymen. "I shot my first feature film, Stakeout on Dope Street, under a fake name because I didn't have a union card. When the union guys came around I would hide under the scenery." He finally brazened his way into the cameraman's local by accusing them of discrimination because of an imaginary black grandfather. "I stick my nose in everywhere," he admits with a kind of offhand bravado. "Take In the Heat of the Night, which had a mediocre script, a fake sociological script. Well, I reworked that a little. I made Poitier's character less of a one-dimensional Mr. Negro. Mike Nichols wanted me to shoot The Graduate for him, but I refused. I thought the whole thing was irrelevant."
Never Sit Down. His first chance for complete creative control came last year, when Paramount asked him to work on a novel about a lonely kid in New York called The Concrete Wilderness. "They already had a considerable investment in it and nowhere to go," he recalls. "I told them nothing interested me about the original, but they told me to go ahead and write whatever I wanted. So I sat down to do a little something about what's happening in this country today. I wanted to sort of make everything turn on the Chicago convention, because I had the feeling it was going to be very bad." It was bad enough, in fact, to get Wexler tear-gassed during shooting and his leading lady busted during the riot, but that was only the beginning of Medium Cool's problems.