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.
