In a lonely, wide-open place

Both are westerns, a highly cinematic genre, but their stories unfold far from even the most makeshift signs of civilization, in deserts of burnt gold, blood orange, aged mustard and glistening amber, places so desolate and nearly abstract and so little inhabited that we could just as easily be in the theatre—the theatre of Beckett, Sartre or Ionesco, say—as the cinema. Except that these two westerns, made simultaneously in 1965, with a combined budget of $150,000 for B-movie king Roger Corman, were helmed by Monte Hellman, who’s never made anything like a normal movie but whose every movie—1971’s Two-Lane Blacktop most famously—is shot-through with a heightened awareness of its movieness. The Shooting and Ride the Whirlwind, both released to zero fanfare in 1966, are distinguished by Hellman’s quiet insistence on disorientation as a method of pulling us deeper into mystery. Hard, clean cuts are all that separate extreme close-ups from wide vistas, the present from flashbacks, what’s happening in one place from what’s happening in another. Space and time are compressed in these compact, unpretentious yet very weird genre pieces as indebted to Antonioni as they are to John Ford. Both are films are now available in a single package from the Criterion Collection.

“Something’s coming,” Gashade (Warren Oates) whispers to Coley (Will Hutchins) in The Shooting. Something’s always coming. The West is an agoraphobic landscape, its every horizon waiting for some potentially perilous emergence. Richard Markowitz’s score sounds more in keeping with Japanese horror than American westerns. Gashade’s a former bounty hunter now tending an unprofitable mine. An unknown gunman has killed one of his partners and his brother has run off. A woman (Millie Perkins) turns up, offering Gashade good money to lead her to the town of Kingsley. She won’t say what she wants there, but Gashade—played with a humble, weary stoicism singular to Oates but echoing Bogart—has a bad feeling. The dread is ever-present, like a strange weather pattern that won’t let up. The film also stars Jack Nicholson and was written by Carole Eastman (as Adrien Joyce), who would soon write Nicholson one of his most iconic roles in Five Easy Pieces (1970). Eastman’s iconoclastic Woman With No Name imbues this western with a refreshingly feminine sensibility that would not be lost on future filmmakers—The Shooting is most certainly somewhere in the DNA of Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010).

Ride the Whirlwind was written by Nicholson and is somewhat more conventional, though its atmosphere is equally eerie and still. It opens with a small gang, headed by one Blind Dick (Harry Dean Stanton), holding up a stagecoach somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Utah. This motley crew cross paths with a trio of cowpokes (Nicholson among them) on their way to Waco. A drama of mistaken identity and frontier justice ensues, but what lingers most in my mind isn’t story but detail, like the lynching victim stumbled upon by the heroes early in the film. What lingers too, for any cinephile at least, is the incredible array of soon-to-be famous, or at least cult-famous, faces assembled here. Hellman had a special genius for casting: he understood that Oates could be so much more than a character actor, that Nicholson could be captivating when doing as little as possible, and that Stanton could be fascinating by playing against a character’s primary attributes. These are both very special, spectral films, artefacts from a transitional moment in American movies, and Criterion’s two-for makes for an excellent double-feature and off-Hollywood history lesson.  

Actual Miles

Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) is among the greatest, most audacious, most truly individual studio-backed movies that could probably only have been made in the 1970s, one that feels like myth from a distance but when you’re actually in it, behind the wheel of it, is really a string of loving detail with no apparent concessions to grand design. It’s about a deal made at some seldom-patronized country service station, a cross-country race for pink slips, with stops only for cheeseburgers, gas and small repairs. One car is a slick yellow GTO, the other a hulking old Chevy, a car that’s all performance, no glamour—it doesn’t even have a heater since a heater might slow it down—and Hellman’s backseat camera shakes with the Chevy’s surges in speed. The movie’s universe is soaked in restlessness, but not the romantic sort. The purity absorbs you without explaining a thing. 

The characters have no names. The Chevy has a Mechanic (Dennis Wilson) and a Driver (James Taylor), a Beach Boy and a famous singer-songwriter, though neither talk much, much less sing—they can’t afford to waste the energy. Even Taylor’s leanness seems calibrated for speed. So these stoic, long-haired hustlers, who are they? Certainly not the counterculture emblems of Easy Rider (1969). Are they young men of their generation or of something much deeper in the American mindset, or maybe that of the late 19^th century European novel? The movie, scripted by Rudy Wurlitzer, opts to keep their mystery intact, while leaving much room for the actors’ low-key charisma to unfurl.

They’re joined by a girl (Laurie Bird, who was pretty mysterious even in real life), a tousled tomboy nymphet vagabond. Her entrance is spied entirely through the window and doorway of a diner; she transfers her body and belongings from one vehicle to another—the Chevy. Driver and Mechanic get in the car as she nests in the back. They drive off without so much as a word, as though her appearance in their car was not planned per se but a perfectly ordinary occurrence. She’s the first to speak. She just wants to make sure they’re not the Zodiac killer. 

Driver and Mechanic, the two-headed lone wolf, are most often seen from the front or behind, while the pilot of the GTO (Warren Oates) is most often seen from the side, the most appropriate point-of-view for a compulsive conversationalist. Few actors in history can be so endearing while being so baldly ingratiating, and Two-Lane Blacktop supplied us with one of Oates’ finest performances. Oates’ affectations are lovingly honed: the stiff collar and cashmere V-necks, the driving gloves with the knuckle-holes, the scarf or ascot or whatever that is round his neck, the tape collection perfectly cued-up so that he can play, say, ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ just as a pretty girl slides into his passenger seat. He claims he’s scouting locations for a “down-home movie on fast cars,” which is doubtlessly total bullshit. He tells the girl he wants to take her away, says they can go to Miami or Montreal or Mexico—he’s a one-man Wild Bunch. (That Oates shares a scene with Harry Dean Stanton, the other greatest character actor of the 1970s, should constitute some special section of cinephile heaven, though the truth is that theirs isn’t one of the film’s best bits, with Stanton playing a hitchhiker who gets weepy when Oates won’t accept his unsolicited affections. “I got no time for sidetracks,” he explains apologetically.)

The racing opponents are also companions, helping each other out along the way, taunting each other playfully, exchanging hard-boiled eggs and hooch or drugs as peace offerings. Like the movie itself, which was shot in sequence in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, they’re in for the long haul—there is nothing else. So it’s no surprise that it all ends with the movie itself seemingly burning up on-screen. Everything is obliterated in the slipstream.

Riding for the feeling: Road to Nowhere

Road to Nowhere begins with an unidentified man pushing a DVD-R—the words “Road to Nowhere” written on its face—into a laptop. “Velma was always my window into the story,” the man says, and as the disc begins to play, we see a woman—Velma?—seated on a bed, blow-drying her nails. The body of the laptop constitutes a “window” all its own, until the camera pushes in and the window falls away, and the woman on the bed is suddenly compelled to blow-dry her face, as though some arctic chill was overtaking her. The image of her doing this holds for a long while, virtually static, but oddly riveting—she’s preparing for something. Soon a man drives up to the woman’s house, and enters; soon we hear a shot; soon after that the woman departs. She drives the man’s car to a lake, where, in another initially serene moment, a Piper Cherokee falls from the sky and crashes into the water.

What’s going on? What sort of movie is this? Neither question is easily answered. Road to Nowhere, written by Steven Gaydos, is a movie about the making of a movie about a blog about a real crime, one involving suicide, murder and money, and whose facts remain elusive. It’s about a filmmaker (Tygh Runyan), teasingly named Mitchell Haven, entranced by an beautiful inexperienced actress (Shannyn Sossamon) who may or may not be connected to the woman she’s been contracted to play. (“I don’t act,” she tells him. “That’s perfect,” he replies.) Drenched in mystery, blurring demarkations between what’s rehearsed, what’s improvised, and what’s genuine, it’s about how illusion overtakes all attempts to capture the real, and contains enough stories-within-stories to make it more Paul Auster than any of Auster’s movies. In some ways it’s also a tribute to actress and photogrpaher Laurie BIrd, who gave such arresting, indelible, troubling performances in Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Cockfighter (1974), who Hellman fell in love with, and who killed herself in 1979 at the age of 25. Road to Nowhere is Hellman’s first movie in over 20 years and, after a single, delightfully baffled viewing, I’m already willing to call it one of his best. It’s now available on DVD and blu-ray from Entertainment One.

Comparisons to Mulholland Drive are inevitable and useful too, given the movie industry milieu, the unresolved enigmas, and the implication that role-playing is both inherently dangerous and quite possibly a wayward route to revelation. But Road to Nowhere, shot in mostly in North Carolina, is more a chamber piece, and also less coy with regards to its knowingness about Hollywood and the spell cast over filmmakers by the work of those who came before them. There’s also a marvelous a cappella performance in a bar from Bonnie Pointer, and a subtextual running commentary about the allure of new digital technology and how it further complicates the ontologies of filmmaking. Road to Nowhere is, in short, very rich, smart, utterly puzzling, hypnotic, and easy on the eyes and ears. I can’t wait to see it again. I don’t know that I’ll be able to make any more sense of its plot afterwards.

"Those satisfactions are permanent": Susan Compo traces the wild life and enduring work of Warren Oates

Tom McGuane said he had the all-time greatest squint in movies. David Thomson suggested that part of his singular appeal came from his being that rare actor willing to look genuinely dumb. (Thomson also fantasized a production of Waiting for Godot where he'd play opposite Harry Dean Stanton, an actor with whom he shared a distinct kinship and, often enough, screen time.) “At first, I played the neurotic hillbilly son or the third man on the horse,” Warren Oates once said, “then worked my way up with tremendous success to being the second heavy on a horse.”

He did countless hours of TV before finding a niche in the New Hollywood of the 60s and 70s, a memorable presence in whatever crazy project in whichever genre was being turned on its head, and was not infrequently the best thing in the movie. He received only a few shots at being something like a leading man—Dillinger (1973), Cockfighter (74), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (74)—but each time filled the screen with cockeyed charisma and a vulnerability that always caught you off guard, made you feel you knew him for real. You may or may not recognize Warren Oates from many films. You surely recognize he face. But if you do know him and his work well, there’s a 50/50 chance he’s one of your favourite actors.

Actress Lee Purcell had another, rather intriguing theory regarding Oates’ peculiar allure: “Warren always had what the best actors had: Warren always had a secret.” If Oates’ secrets were indeed key to his magnetism, then Susan Compo’s Warren Oates: A Wild Life (University Press of Kentucky, $34.95) is for the most careful to keep the allure intact. It’s not that Compo’s especially shy about detailing Oates’ considerable appetites for liquor, women, drugs and the company of Sam Peckinpah; on the contrary, it’s rather that A Wild Life remains largely a work of reportage without too much in the way of analysis, conjecture or reverie. The prose is on the pedestrian side, the use of quotations to verify simple points sometimes excessive, and, while contradictions are duly addressed—Oates the gentle country boy obsessed with the stock market, the Zen-loving pacifist by nature who also described himself as an anarchist—Oates the man is kept at a certain distance.

Still, it needs to be said that Compo has done admirers—and anyone with serious interest in films of the era—a great service. If solid research can be described as loving, Compo’s book deserves the tag. Taking us from Oates’ Kentucky roots through his early struggles in New York and ambling ascent to character actor stardom in Los Angeles, with many wives and many, many riotous and often famous drinking buddies along the way, A Wild Life compresses a life’s trajectory with a balance of tidiness and detours into some terrific anecdotes—after the first few rather stiff chapters are out of the way, Compo offers a very fun read. And if it feels like less than a fully realized portrait, maybe that’s okay. Oates spent his whole career letting us take long hard looks into his rumpled soul.

Something I hope A Wild Life will help remedy is the almost exclusive association of Oates with Peckinpah, who cast the actor so brilliantly in westerns like Ride the High Country (62) and The Wild Bunch (68), not to mention the sublimely demented Alfredo Garcia. As Compo makes clear, Oates’ collaborations with lesser-known Monte Hellman were just as important. Hellman arguably did more to allow the full breadth of Oates' persona to bloom onscreen, developing leading roles that, even when rendering Oates mute (!), would flush out a rich blend of endearing affectation, innocence, curiosity, orneriness, and desperation. Perhaps the increased availability of Hellman-Oates films like Cockfighter, The Shooting (67) and Two-Lane Blacktop (71) especially will also help generate greater interest in their legacy.

I knew how A Wild Life was going to end, obviously, but it still choked me up. No matter how many times Oates was killed in the movies, no one seemed prepared for his actual death, which occurred off-screen, one afternoon while his lunch was being prepared. He was 53. Despite vague concerns about his general health, there were few alarms preceding the event, though the day before the doctor-phobic Oates phoned up Hellman and told him he’d had a heart attack—before chuckling and saying it was actually just indigestion. No one could ever replace Oates, but there is one great little story in here that reminds us that at least one contemporary American performer has taken up the baton. Oates saw Tom Waits on TV in 1976, fumbling through an interview, erratically searching through his pockets for his lighter. as Compo writes, “Oates took one look at the disheveled singer’s predicament and pronounced, ‘That guy stole my act.’”