Set in Chicago during the summer of 1968, Medium Cool stars Robert Forster as television news cameraman John Cassellis, who along with his sound man partner Gus (Peter Bonerz, the dentist on the old Bob Newhart show) are first seen passively filming a dying woman at a traffic incident. Like everyone else in the film, they have been hardened to the realities of violence in American society. And why not? From the newscasts that kept a running count of the dead and injured in Vietnam, to the Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, to the violent and ugly public spectacle of the riots outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the ugly specter of violence was rearing its head everywhere during that summer.

When he’s not with his foxy nurse girlfriend Ruth (Marianna Hill), Cassellis covers an Illinois National Guard civil unrest drill (complete with fake hippies preaching love and peace) and works on a "human interest" story about a damned-if-he-does-damned-if-he doesn’t black cab driver (Sid McCoy) who returned 10,000 dollars he found in his cab only to face suspicion from the police and disbelief from his friends. Cassellis meets and falls in love with Vietnam War widow and former West Virginia schoolteacher Eileen (Verna Bloom), who lives in a ghetto tenement with her 13-going-on-65 year old son Harold (Harold Blankenship). Casselis, becoming more and more distanced from his work, now seems positively paternal with the mother and son.

But back at the newsroom, Cassellis gets a bombshell; management has been giving his news footage of draft card burners to the police and F.B.I. to identify subversives. Cassellis tries to raise a stink and is promptly canned. Out in the street, he tells a co-worker, "They can tell if your camera is a tool of the government. Why do you think so many news cameramen get beaten up?"

He gets a new job taking films of the convention, but when Harold sees mom in a passionate lock with Cassellis, the child runs away from home. Eileen goes looking for Harold in the streets of Chicago filled with anti-war protesters, the National Guard, mayor Richard Daley’s brutish police (with itchy night sticks) and the omniscient, God-like eye of the television camera. In an astounding and ballsy piece of filmmaking, Wexler actually has actress Verna Bloom wandering around ground zero of the riots – in character no less! It’s a frightening sequence that give us the protesters, the police and the National Guard all playing to the cameras ("the whole world is watching!") in a disturbingly violent clash made unsettlingly into theater by the very presence of Bloom.

The film’s conclusion seems so arbitrary that its attempt at shocking irony falls flat, but that’s a small debit here. There are more than enough memorable scenes herein – Cassellis and a skittish Gus at the house of the black cab driver, whose friends admonish Cassellis for representing a white media that excludes blacks, and for trying to distill 300 years of black history into news stories; housewives, scared of revolutionary mayhem in the streets, learning to shoot; Harold’s flashback to his coal miner father’s lessons in the kind of misogyny that promotes wife beating ("women get high ideas- don’t let em"); a group of young Bobby Kennedy supporters ("Why do you support Kennedy?" Cassellis asks. "He’s got long hair!" replies one girl); and a group of camera men trading job-related war stories and speculating on the role of the media in society.

It’s a great looking film – anything shot by Wexler could hardly be otherwise – and there’s a cool neo-surf guitar score by the late great Mike Bloomfield, and a few songs by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (Cassellis and Eileen boogie to Frank’s "Who Needs the Peace Corps?"). Originally rated X (ostensibly for a brief shot of Marianna Hill’s pubis) it’s not hard to see that for its time, Wexler’s film, with its naked footage of the Chicago police literally cracking open the skulls of teenagers, showed a polarized, politicized and frightened America, and that such a view frightened the studios. That the film exists at all is reason enough to seek it out.

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Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.