Mickey One is a 1965 American neo noir crime film starring Warren Beatty and directed by Arthur Penn from a script by Alan Surgal.

When he gets a booking at the upscale club Xanadu, he finds that his first rehearsal has become a special "audition" for an unseen man with a frightening, gruff voice (Aram Avakian).

The Artist eventually unleashes his Rube Goldberg-like creation, a deliberately self-destructive machine called "Yes," an homage to the sculptor Jean Tinguely.

"[4] In 1979, James Monaco wrote Mickey One 'except for Woody Allen's Interiors, is the most pretentious film by a major American filmmaker in the last thirty years'.

When he goes on the run, Mickey meets a woman who wonders who he is (since he can't shake his show-biz patina) and he hits her with the line: "I'm the king of silent movies hiding out till the talkies blow over."

But fortune quickly turns -- witness to a torture murder in a back room, the comic flees, hoboes his way to Chicago's West Side and takes refuge in a junkyard.

In a classic scene, the comic is up against a brick wall auditioning at a nightclub, a single, powerful spotlight trained on him so he can't see into the audience.

[9] The film's soundtrack, reverberating with hints of everything from Béla Bartók to bossa nova, reteamed Stan Getz with arranger Eddie Sauter, following their album Focus[10] (1961).