Made on roughly the same budget as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and shot shortly after the assassination of J.F.K., Monte Hellman’s The Shooting (1966) is a western very much of its time that was not properly released in its time. It’s informed by films like The Virginian (1962), One Eyed Jacks (1961), Stagecoach (1939), and My Darling Clementine (1946), yet infused with an aesthetic not far from L’Avventura (1960) or Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It stars Warren Oates, Jack Nicholson, and Millie Perkins. It also stars a ghostly and lunar landscape that ceased to exist with the completion of the dam on the Colorado river in 1966. Strange to think kids partying on a houseboat atop Lake Powell now skim water a hundred or so feet above the totemic panorama that gives The Shooting so much of its visual power.
The mid-sixties was a time when the old guard were making their last westerns. Lee Marvin had just won an Academy Award for Cat Ballou (1965), which was far from the high-water mark for the genre. Hellman had higher ambitions. For him the western was a unique genre rich with potential akin to Greek tragedy, one that allowed the story-teller to really examine man’s relationship to the universe. That was on one side of the equation. On the other was Roger Corman, who had given Jack Nicholson a leg up in the film business and suggested they capitalize on their remote locations by shooting two westerns back-to-back, the other title being Ride in the Whirlwind.
Nicholson, not only acting but taking on his first producer role, went to Cannes and sold The Shooting to a company that went out of business, thus holding up the title in litigation for three years. But the critical acclaim it received in France helped enhance Hellman’s reputation in the U.S., and it paved the way for his celebrated collaboration with screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, musician James Taylor, and again Warren Oates in what would be one of the most iconic road movies of all time: Two-Lane Blacktop (1971).
Road movies are about the journey, not the destination, and there’s something about this to be found in The Shooting. The script was by Carole Eastman, who also wrote the script for Five Easy Pieces (1970). Carole had a distrust of men and didn’t like to be touched, which might explain a thing or two about the female antagonist in The Shooting who drives the narrative with her thirst for revenge. She is on the chase, on the go, never stopping, her deep desire for resolution driving the narrative engine across uncharted terrain and into the valley of death.
Carole was inspired by a Jack London story involving a painting in a bar showing a man getting killed (see excerpt below, from Monte Hellman: His Life and Films). Hellman was also inspired by images of death, but his were moving images involving two men: JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald. In both cases, we are witness to assassination, a shooting. Concrete ends, but with mysteries never resolved.
Throughout July TCM has been “presenting the largest showcase of Westerns in the history of the network”. The Shooting screens this Wednesday on TCM. For further reading, check out Michael Atkinson’s excellent essay on both The Shooting and Ride the Whirlwind: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3360-the-shooting-and-ride-in-the-whirlwind-we-can-bring-a-good-bit-of-rope
