Photographed in Chicago against the clamor and violence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where cast principals were on their own as they made their way through the crowds and police lines. Buildup to these later sequences frequently is confusing and motives difficult to fathom.
Director Haskell Wexler, in his first indie production, mixes ‘reality’ with the ‘theatrical’, his two chief protagonists a realistic TV newsreel cameraman and a young hillbilly mother come to Chicago with her young son.
Wexler adopts a documentary approach which helps sustain the mood and his cast fits into this pattern.
Robert Forster is strongly cast as the lenser who refuses to become emotionally involved with any of his assignments until caught up in the injustice done to a Negro and while on TV assignment, falls in love with a young mother.
