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| Director Monte Hellman |
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| Writer, co-producer, and actor Jack Nicholson |
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| Lake Powell in Glen Canyon today |
RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND B USA (82 mi) 1966 d: Monte Hellman
Shot back-to-back with The Shooting (1966) in the Utah desert outside Kanab during a combined six-week shooting in 1965, each given a $75,000 budget by legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman with a crew of just seven people, both shot by cinematographer Gregory Sandor, who would go on to shoot the cross-country road movie Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) as well, each one conceived by young American director Monte Hellman before he established himself in the industry, yet what’s noteworthy is that the reddish Glen Canyon setting for this film no longer exists, as all of their locations are currently submerged under several hundred feet of water by a man-made reservoir, Lake Powell. Though the film was screened at the San Francisco Film Festival in the fall of 1966, it failed to interest U.S. film distributors and never obtained an American theatrical release until 1972, and was instead immediately sold to television, though it was shown out of competition at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival and played theatrically in France for six months in 1969, where it gained cult success on the French arthouse circuit, well received and critically acclaimed, endorsed by the editorial staff of the prestigious Cahiers du Cinéma, describing the film as “something new and original,” bringing attention to Hellman abroad before he was recognized in America. By the early 60’s, westerns were already starting to be given a different look in Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962), John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and David Miller’s vastly underrated LONELY ARE THE BRAVE (1962), while Sergio Leone started the spaghetti western craze with A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964). Hellman eschewed widescreen compositions that capture the expansive panoramic landscapes of the American West, as was the custom at the time, and instead narrowed the focus to accentuate the tense claustrophobic anxiety. Hellman studied drama at Stanford, then film at UCLA, taking a job as an apprentice film editor at ABC Studios, but he also founded the Theatergoers Company, and with financial help from Corman staged the Los Angeles premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, turning it into a western with Pozzo as a Texas rancher and Lucky as a Native-American Indian. Not so much a story, but more of a collection of incidents and character studies, what’s so essential about this film is that it completely subverts the western genre, which typically glorifies the good guys against the bad guys, with a heroic hero at the center leading the action, usually a character audiences can sympathize with. In this film you’d be hard pressed to find a hero, while dialogue and action sequences are minimized to the bare essentials. What that means is that the story is advanced through visuals, which simply was not done at the time, becoming more in line with an art film, and a predecessor to the dour fatalistic excursions of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). The minimalist script was actually written by Jack Nicholson, who was also a co-producer and lead actor in the film, creating an ambiguous moral drama about frontier justice and how easily it was to be swept away by an ingrained culture of incessant violence, where the motto may as well have been “shoot first and ask questions afterwards.” With similarities to the lynch mob hysteria in William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), both are spare and uncompromising, yet also elusive to the core, where this reveals a couple of innocent cowhands who mistakenly get swept up in a bloodthirsty posse’s push for vigilante justice. The wide open spaces of the American frontier are a fertile ground for lawlessness and indiscriminate killing, where the barrel of a gun sets the tone for the absence of justice.
Both Hellman films are considered to be the earliest examples of a revisionist acid Western that brought contemporary 60’s counterculture ideologies into the classic realms of western lore, and while both are quiet films, accentuating the interpersonal relationships between a few people, they’re also very different films, where the grim, fatalistic tone reflects the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. The Shooting, written by Carole Eastman, features Warren Oates in his first starring role butting heads with a ruthless female protagonist (Millie Perkins), becoming altogether abstract, uncompromising, and hallucinogenic in its fatalistic, existential moral ambiguities. But don’t be fooled by the supposed critical favoritism heaped upon The Shooting, declaring it the masterpiece between the two, more challenging in its minimalist structure, with its relentless expression of existential despair, as this underestimated yet more authentic film is defiantly realistic, more conventional and plot-driven, exhibiting a spare, austere quality, where the simplicity and naturalistic tone sets this apart from most all other westerns you can think of, bringing to mind Peter Fonda’s largely unseen The Hired Hand (1971). At the outset, a bumbling group of outlaws rob a passing stagecoach, yet Hellman slows the action down so the scenes play out in real-time, turning morbid when one of them takes a bullet, where there’s only two passengers and barely any money, hardly worth it you might think, but this botched robbery makes you realize not every heist pays off, which is the chance you take. Simultaneously, three cowboys are seen riding home to Texas after the rodeo they were to perform in got canceled. As they travel through a similar terrain, Wes (Jack Nicholson), Vern (Cameron Mitchell) and Otis (Tom Filer), stop to view the gruesome remains of a hanged man strung up to a tree, the kind of thing that makes you think twice about entering the territory, as it’s just such an ominous sign, like a Shakespearean witch’s prophecy. They don’t react much, offering a few stoic comments, but these are not articulate men, outsiders most of their lives, never staying in any one place very long. The sparse dialogue is actually taken from the frontier diaries and journalistic accounts of the time, like Andy Adams’ The Log of a Cowboy, a real-life account of his experiences on the trail, or A.S. Mercer’s The Banditti of the Plains (Asa Mercer and The Banditti of the Plains) and The Cattlemen's Invasion of Wyoming in 1892 (The Crowning Infamy of the Ages), a true account of the crimes against homesteaders by cattle barons, with a scathing exposé about Wyoming’s Johnson County War (The Johnson County War: 1892 Invasion of Northern ...), including the siege and burning of a ranch house to draw out the inhabitants who were shot on sight, read by Nicholson when he was writing the script, providing insights into the characters he was writing about, crafting a story of simple men caught up in the cruelties of the time, and an authentic reflection of the American West. As fate would have it, the three cowhands mistakenly wander right into a remote cabin holing up the stage outlaws, sensing no trouble at first, just a place to bed down for the night, spending the night sleeping with the horses. The cowboys are suspicious of the ragged crew, but the one-eyed leader, Blind Dick (Harry Dean Stanton), is hospitable enough, sharing food and corn whisky, but by morning they’re greeted with a hail of bullets, surrounded by a vigilante posse aiming to either shoot them or string them up to a tree, thinking they are all part of the stagecoach holdup gang, with Otis shot trying to make it to his horse. Like Mercer’s historical exposé, the posse burns down the cabin, executing those inside, with Wes and Vern trying to make an escape on foot up a high ridge of a box-canyon that offers no real chance of getting away.
There are overlaps in the two films, each a story of paranoia and pursuit, expressed through alienation and existentialism, with Hellman claiming all his films have been informed in some way by Samuel Beckett, asking fundamental existential questions like “Who are we?” and “Where are we going?” While this is a dark and brooding, psychologically intense western, introducing both slow-motion and realistic violence, while also using a limited musical score that never overshadows what happens onscreen, it lacks the suffocating dread that elevates The Shooting, where all the characters are bigger than life, yet the stripped down, bare minimum aspect of this film is highly unusual, with minimal dialogue, which is a true standout, among the most economic scripts of the 1960’s. Yet its brazen depiction of a roving posse bypassing the legal system by taking the power of the gun into their own hands reflects the current power unbalance that continues to haunt America’s racial crisis through perpetual police shootings on the streets of America today. What it also captures that other westerns seem to omit is the pervasive sense of loneliness from such extreme isolation, essentially cut off from the rest of humanity. The enveloped emptiness from traversing vast distances on horseback can only be described as incredibly monotonous, where the land poses such a physical challenge, as it’s even difficult to do today in a car with all the newfangled gadgetry, so imagine the difficulties encountered going on such long distance rides, wearing the same clothes, struggling to find water, eating the same basic meals of biscuits and beans, having little to talk about on those grueling days in the saddle under the hot sun. Not anyone’s idea of a good time. Hellman reimagines what the West was like from a personal perspective, working against tradition, so instead of focusing his attention on action sequences, he instead shows us what happens in between the bursts of gunfire and furious chases, offering the perspective of those being hunted down. This alternative vision of the West is immediately apparent, where you need look no further than seeing Harry Dean Stanton step behind a rock and take a piss. This is just not something you see in other westerns. There are bookended scenes of a family homestead, where the ranch is run by an older man (George Mitchell) and his wife (Katherine Squire), along with their attractive 19-year-old daughter Abigail (Millie Perkins). The posse visits them first, inspecting the house and barn for the escapees, and leave satisfied they’re not harboring criminals. Shortly afterwards, however, Wes and Vern have commandeered the women inside while the old man continues to work outdoors, taking an axe to a giant tree stump. But once he sets foot inside, he is disarmed as well, suddenly at the mercy of these supposed dangerous outlaws who attempt to explain their innocence, to no avail, as what is the family supposed to believe when they take their horses, viewing them as little more than common horse thieves. The quietness and non-threatening manner of this home invasion, however, speaks volumes, attempting to be polite while at the same time exposing the desperateness of their situation, protagonists on the lam from a lynch mob, as that hanging posse has promised the settlers, “They’ve seen their last sunrise.” In this film there are no heroes or villains, just victims of tragic circumstances that reveal the hardships of trying to settle the American West, where even for those who somehow manage to make it, there is a devastating cost associated with everyday survival, where there’s an underlying feeling of sorrow that saturates every frame of this film.
Ride in the Whirlwind | Jack Nicholson full movie, YouTube (1:22:06)
